The Microchip Agenda

[matrixcutter]

Privacy groups fear 'Medishare' card scheme
Renee Viellaris
June 08, 2009 12:00am

PATIENTS' private medical files will be shared among health professionals under a Rudd Government plan for a contentious healthcare card.

From the middle of next year, the Medicare card will provide doctors, dentists, pharmacists and paramedics with an encyclopedia-like file on patients' medical histories, medications and treatments.

Health Minister Nicola Roxon said patients would receive better treatment, as medical errors and the expense of performing lost tests were slashed.

"We've made a decision that every Australian will be allocated a unique health identity," Ms Roxon told The Courier-Mail in an exclusive interview.

"It would be a card, most likely with a chip that would store your information on it, which you would then provide to health professionals and give them access to it when you wanted them to see it."

While the medical community has given cautious support to the plan, privacy bodies want certain safeguards attached.

Concerns over the security of online health information were raised earlier this year when The Courier-Mail revealed that the names and medical details of about 100 Sullivan Nicolaides pathology patients were posted on the internet.

Australian Privacy Commissioner Karen Curtis is investigating whether the episode was an accident or a breach of the company's security.

She has advised the Government's National e-Health Transition Authority, which is in charge of electronic health projects, to attach "sensitivity labels" to certain medical histories, such as those relating to sexually transmitted diseases.

Australian Medical Association president Andrew Pesce said patients had to be able to control access to their information.

"This sounds like a good first step towards introducing electronic records which can help improve patient safety and health outcomes," Dr Pesce said.

"However, patients need to have control over what is placed in their records and must be assured rigorous privacy safeguards are in place."

Ms Roxon said privacy was a concern for the public, so the model would be patient-controlled and patients would determine who could view their files, with the exception of paramedics.

"I think it would need to make sure there is a mechanism for emergency services staff to be able to access it without your permission, because obviously you may not be able to when the ambulance arrives," she said.

Ms Roxon said she expected the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission to make strong recommendations for e-health in its final report this month.

It is estimated that in the past decade about $5 billion has been spent on failed e-health proposals.

The Howard government planned to introduce the Access Card - essentially a national identification card - which would have contained health plus welfare and tax details.

The measure was scuttled by Labor when it won office in 2007.

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Step-by-step.

[khalil]

A graphic designer mused this idea, "I think," it's a chip in the head which he was very enthusiastic about. This is not an actual promotion by Apple.. at least for now. Read the full post here*, i'm including key excerpts from it below. Note that the poster's profile says "Nothing on this blog is true... but it's exactly the way things are."

* note: the larger images are available on that link.

...there's been alot of talk about what will happen when the creeping advance of digital technology begins to directly permeate our consciousness. We already have bionic body parts, brain implants, mind-interaction software, primitive AI, and all kinds of other that are signs of the continuing fusion between man and machine.

This also got me thinking about the inevitable augmentation of human experience through computers that will link directly to our conscious thoughts. This web is already being interwoven, so to speak, and there is speculation that some sort of super-consciousness could result. This idea has been given labels such as the Hive Mind, The Singularity, The End of Novelty, etc.

My Dad always jokes that one day, people are just going to be white blobs hooked up to all kinds of computers & electronics. I'd been thinking about the possibility of microchips being implanted that were essentially computers connecting to our brains. I wondered how my favorite brand, Apple, would exist in such circumstances.

That's when I thought up the "iThink"

The below specification is a strange thing to come up with by-chance and looks more like a tongue-in-cheek joke. (ie: 666: mark of the beast)

• Holographic Data Storage:
The iThink’s tiny internal holochip has a staggering individual capacity of over 666 Yottabytes (1000^8), for seemingly infinite augmented memory

One of the commentator's on this blog thinks of this as cool and fascinating and not as a threat due to being conditioned/programmed by entertainment:

I really enjoyed the graphics! Good job! Your concept reminds me of a book I recently read, "Feed" by M.T. Anderson. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(novel)

It is a great book that explores the idea of having a chip in our brain, much like the way you describe iThink. If anyone finds iThink an interesting concept, go read the book.

[matrixcutter]

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=9689.msg437653#msg437653

Kevin Warwick:

Well of course implants is very close to my heart as a subject.  The first implant was back in '98.  That was an RFID - an identification implant - and became the first human to have one [bullshit].  The main implant was in 2002 where 100 electrodes were fired into my nervous system to link my nervous system to computer and onto the internet.  I was able to control from my brain signals a robot hand on a different continent.  Clearly that's useful for somebody who's had their hand amputated; to have a hand like this that they control directly from their brain.

Publicity for the sort of experiments that I do is vitally important.  We need to attract more students into science and technology, need to show that it is exciting, that we can do new experiments, we can open the box.  So I think there are all sorts of reasons for actually opening up what we're doing, carrying out experiments like the implant experiments to get people into what's going on.

We have cellphones now and for many people they can't live without them, for texting, for communication they have to have them.  So many people are now walking around with this thing almost perpetually attached to them.  The next step clearly has to be some form of implant, some form of connection so that the technology is implanted.  And I don't think we're suddenly going to say "alright we're going to move away and have a day away from the network."  Life is such that we can't actually do that.  We can't move away.  Our lives are wholly dependent on being connected in.  We are part of the system and will become more and more part of it, which is going to mean signals being sent from one brain to another, directly.

[matrixcutter]

ID cards for sheep? Must be another E-ewe edict
26 September 2008
By Martyn McLaughlin



IT IS said that counting sheep is a good way to bring on sleep. But the prospect of counting 7,131,000 is having the opposite effect and causing sleepless nights for Scotland's farmers.

There is barely a remote glen or inhospitable mountainside in the country without a distant white speck. Ordinarily, those charged with their welfare are content to let their flock lazily graze, tending to them only when necessary.

Soon, however, the hills may play host to maddening chases, as a proposal from Brussels asks that Scotland's sheep population – 7,131,000 at the last count – be electronically tagged: the equivalent of barcodes for sheep.

So worried are Scotland's sheep farmers about the proposed rules that next month they are taking their fight to the top brass of the European Union. They will say that the new process is neither cost-effective, accurate nor practical.

Given Scotland has the largest breeding flock in all of Europe, there are fears the measures could herald the demise of an industry already facing a perilous future.

More than 8,000 sheep farmers north of the Border have put their name to a petition stating unequivocally their objections to the directive.

The Electronic Identification (EID) scheme, first mooted a decade ago, is due to become operational in 2010. It is envisaged by the EU as the best way of tracing animal movements, and stemming the spread of disease.

However, some estimate it could cost Scotland's farmers £10 million a year, with the price of a single tag about £1.25.

MSP John Scott, who farms 800 ewes in Ballantrae, South Ayrshire, told The Scotsman EID will damage a entire way of life.

Mr Scott, the Tory spokesman for rural development and the environment, said: "At a time when livestock, and particularly sheep, are leaving Scotland's hills and uplands in their tens of thousands, EID is one extra cost that can be ill-afforded.

"There's no real benefit to it. We should be looking to reduce unnecessary costs and regulations, given the costs of fertiliser have tripled in the last two years and fuel costs have increased by 60 to 70 per cent in the last year. We can't allow EID to happen."

The system works by embedding a radio frequency micro-chip in an ear tag, which can then be read by scanners. The signal is recorded, and can be sent to a central database to trace the animal's movements. That, at least, is the theory.

Tentative trials of EID in Scotland have been far from conclusive, with one test study showing that tags were unable to be read at abattoirs and livestock auction markets who, along with individual farmers, will be charged with monitoring movements. In one study at an auction market, the tags of as many as one in four sheep were not picked up.

Bob Carruth, communications director for NFU Scotland, said: "Sheep farmers are already struggling to get a reasonable return. If you factor-in the additional costs of the EID scheme, then it will be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

"We have the largest sheep population in Europe, and half of those are hill sheep in remote areas, not the kind of sheep that are handled every day.

"It is a scheme that has some merit for countries with far smaller sheep numbers. It should be a voluntary option for member nations. For that reason, we are trying to get EID taken off of the statute book."

Mr Carruth pointed out that the average hill farm in Scotland has an income in the region of £6,000, a figure that will only decrease with the advent of EID.

"It's totally impractical to have farmers trying to tag sheep up mountainous and upland areas in all kinds of weather," Mr Carruth added.

"It's only right and proper to have a system of movement in place but, the reality is, the existing 'batch' system we have satisfies all the requirements. We can trace sheep from the farm to the fork."

George Milne, development officer of the National Sheep Association in Scotland, said: "The industry is experiencing severe financial pressure as well as a substantial loss in ewe numbers. There is no doubt the unnecessary cost and practical difficulties of the proposed regulations will cause a further exodus of breeding sheep and a resultant deterioration of the social fabric in many parts of Scotland, which are already on the edge of economic viability."

A new EID pilot study, funded by the Scottish Government, keen to ascertain the effectiveness of the system, began this week. While its efficiency is as yet unclear, Mr Carruth suggested it would not be a surprise to find similar results as before.

"There are problems with the scanners," he said. "I'm not going to pre-empt the trial, but the same issues are emerging.

"You only have to look at the annual sheep sale in Lairg (in Sutherland] . You have 24,000 animals going through the ring – how do you scan them all?"

IN NUMBERS

7,131,000

Scotland's sheep population

9,563,190

Scotland's sheep population as of 1997

368,000

Drop in number of sheep in the past twelve months

24.5%

Decline in number of breeding ewes over the past nine years

30,000

Amount of sheepmeat in tonnes produced a year by Scotland's sheep farms

£150m

Value of the nation's sheep farming sector

£1,000 - £2000

Set-up costs of EID scheme for farmers, estimated by DEFRA

£1.25

Estimated cost of one EID tag

£1.55

Estimated cost to a farmer tagging one sheep under the EID scheme

110m

Number of ewes in Europe

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EU tells farmers to tag every sheep in Britain
Farmers will have to spend £65 million tagging every single sheep in Britain under new EU rules.
Published: 1:36PM BST 14 Apr 2009


30 million sheep will be required to wear a hi-tech tag

From January 1 next year Britain's 30 million sheep will be required to wear a hi-tech tag which can monitor their movements.

European commissioners claim the electronic ID (EID) tags will help contain an outbreak of disease such as the foot and mouth epidemic in 2001.

Farmers will have to burden 92 per cent of the cost themselves at a cost of £5,000 for an electronic tag reader and up to £1.50 per tag.

They have criticised the proposals as "crazy" and "unnecessary" and say the extra costs could force them out of business.

John Hore, a farmer from Pilning, near Bristol, said: "We are prepared to fight this to the bitter end.

"The strength of feeling is such that it is quite possible we will see farmers taking to the streets. We are just not being listened to. And we need our government firmly behind us.

"We have 30 million sheep in this country - probably more than the rest of Europe put together.

"They want each one of those sheep to be individually identified. And farmers are saying 'No, it's just not possible'. This could do to the sheep industry what TB is doing to the cattle industry."

John Mercer, chief livestock adviser to the National Farmers' Union, said: "It's a crazy rule. It's not wanted. It's not needed. And it could, potentially, devastate the sheep industry. We really need political pressure now."

Farmers also claim the technology is flawed and will be dogged with technical faults in field conditions, particularly on hill farms where flocks are several thousands strong.

The regulation to tag every sheep in Europe at a cost of £109million was adopted by the EU in 2003.

The original start date was January 1 2008 but this was delayed by two years after objections from farmers.

In Britain, farmers will be expected to carry out 92 per cent of the expected £65 million costs, markets and collection centres five per cent and abattoirs three per cent.

Farmers are still lobbying for the scheme to be made voluntary before the scheme is introduced.

The UK is home to Europe's largest flock and, in a report complied by the Joint Research Centre - which advises the government on technical issues - they have warned farmers here will be hardest hit.

Farmers Union of Wales' hill farming committee chairman Derek Morgan said: "I dread to think what the full costs to the EU sheep industry will be.

"This report simply adds to the already overwhelming evidence that shows that costs of EID are completely disproportionate, while the benefits are negligible, and could actually be negative in the case of a disease outbreak.

"We are committed to fighting this ridiculous legislation to the bitter end and this is yet more evidence which totally undermines the basis on which the Council of Ministers has made their decisions.

"However, the industry must also brace itself and start planning on the assumption that it will come in next year, because the majority of member states are hell-bent on ignoring the evidence."

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This is probably a not-so-subtle message to those with eyes to see, similar to when they announced cloning to the world by presenting a sheep, called Dolly.

And here's another typical one, an advert for train tickets:

Human Beings Represented As Sheep (30s)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctaULmdHzJ0

[matrixcutter]

'Supermarkets set to refuse cash'
Thursday 11 June 2009

Dutch supermarkets are hoping to phase out the use of cash by 2014, the Financieele Dagblad reports on Thursday, quoting the retail board CBL.

The aim of the ban on cash is to make supermarkets less vulnerable to armed robberies, the paper says.

According to CBL research, 87% of customers support moves to stimulate the use of direct debit cards.

The Telegraaf reports that €10bn of supermarket total turnover of over €30bn last year was in cash. Supermarkets had to deal with 200 'incidents', ranging from a grab at the cash register to armed robbery, the paper said.

Other solutions will be found for customers who do not want to use direct debit cards, a CBL spokesman said. 'Technology is making enormous advances. Trials are also being done with payment by mobile phone, but you can also pay with a finger print or iris scan,' * the spokesman said.

The Dutch consumers association said the move was 'going too far'.

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* And later - if all goes to plan - a microchip implant.

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Alan Watt mentioned this article in the following mp3:

June 12, 2009
Alan Watt "Cutting Through The Matrix" on RBN:
The Upper Crust of Population Trust:
"Optimum Population Trust, All Fret and Fume,
Obsessed with Predictions of Gloom and Doom,
Because General Population Tends to Elevate Life,
'Stead of Promoting Death and Increased Strife,
To the Youth Education They'll No Doubt Bring
A Curriculum of Death as a Wonderful Thing,
For the Wealthy Elite, Longevity They Strive,
They've Proven Their Value, in Money They Thrive,
Their Plan for the Masses in Stages All Neat,
First Starve Them, Then Plague Them, They're Obsolete,
In Organization and Power, Full of Resolve,
Got to Kill Off the Masses Who Just Can't Evolve"
***Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - June 12, 2009 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)
***LISTEN / DOWNLOAD

Topics of show covered in following links:
"Mixing with Malthusians" by Brendan O'Neill (spiked-online.com) - April 1, 2009.
United Nations PDFs on Population Reduction:
(1) "The contribution of population policy to the achievement the MDGs" Hania Zlotnik, Director, Population Division, UN (un.org) - Dec. 15, 2008.
(2) Slide Show of Above.
"Inside Out - East: Insider account - clouds of secrecy" (bbc.co.uk) - Nov. 6, 2006.
Video: "Clouds of Secrecy (Part 1)" [Spraying Chemicals on Britons, 50s and 60s] (youtube.com).
"MoD test of aerial spraying over Norwich" (nr23.net).
"The Dorset Biological Warfare Experiments 1963-75" (nr23.net).
"IDEA Position on Genetically Modified Foods" Irish Doctors Environmental Association (ideaireland.org).
"Supermarkets set to refuse cash" (dutchnews.nl) - June 11, 2009.
"US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive" by Tom Leonard (telegraph.co.uk) - June 12, 2009.

[matrixcutter]

Wednesday, June 10, 2009
CIA and Pentagon Deploy RFID "Death Chips." Coming Soon to a Product Near You!

What Pentagon theorists describe as a "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA) leverages information technology to facilitate (so they allege) command decision-making processes and mission effectiveness, i.e. the waging of aggressive wars of conquest.

It is assumed that U.S. technological preeminence, referred to euphemistically by Airforce Magazine as "compressing the kill chain," will assure American military hegemony well into the 21st century. Indeed a 2001 study, Understanding Information Age Warfare, brought together analysts from a host of Pentagon agencies as well as defense contractors Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton and the MITRE Corporation and consultants from ThoughtLink, Toffler Associates and the RAND Corporation who proposed to do just.

As a result of this and other Pentagon-sponsored research, military operations from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond aim for "defined effects" through "kinetic" and "non-kinetic" means: leadership decapitation through preemptive strikes combined with psychological operations designed to pacify (terrorize) insurgent populations. This deadly combination of high- and low tech tactics is the dark heart of the Pentagon's Unconventional Warfare doctrine.

In this respect, "network-centric warfare" advocates believe U.S. forces can now dominate entire societies through ubiquitous surveillance, an always-on "situational awareness" maintained by cutting edge sensor arrays as well as by devastating aerial attacks by armed drones, warplanes and Special Forces robosoldiers.

Meanwhile on the home front, urbanized RMA in the form of ubiquitous CCTV systems deployed on city streets, driftnet electronic surveillance of private communications and radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips embedded in commodities are all aspects of a control system within securitized societies such as ours.

As Antifascist Calling has written on more than one occasion, contemporary U.S. military operations are conceived as a branch of capitalist management theory, one that shares more than a passing resemblance to the organization of corporate entities such as Wal-Mart.

Similar to RMA, commodity flows are mediated by an ubiquitous surveillance of products--and consumers--electronically. Indeed, Pentagon theorists conceive of "postmodern" warfare as just another manageable network enterprise.

The RFID (Counter) Revolution

Radio-frequency identification tags are small computer chips connected to miniature antennae that can be fixed to or implanted within physical objects, including human beings. The chip itself contains an Electronic Product Code that can be read each time a reader emits a radio signal.

The chips are subdivided into two distinct categories, passive or active. A passive tag doesn't contain a battery and its read range is variable, from less than an inch to twenty or thirty feet. An active tag on the other hand, is self-powered and has a much longer range. The data from an active tag can be sent directly to a computer system involved in inventory control--or weapons targeting.

It is hardly surprising then, that the Pentagon and the CIA have spent "hundreds of millions of dollars researching, developing, and purchasing a slew of 'Tagging tracking and locating' (TTL) gear," Wired reports.

Long regarded as an urban myth, the military's deployment of juiced-up RFID technology along the AfPak border in the form of "tiny homing beacons to guide their drone strikes in Pakistan," has apparently moved out of the laboratory. "Most of these technologies are highly classified" Wired reveals,

But there's enough information in the open literature to get a sense of what the government is pursuing: laser-based reflectors, super-strength RFID tags, and homing beacons so tiny, they can be woven into fabric or into paper.

Some of the gadgets are already commercially available; if you're carrying around a phone or some other mobile gadget, you can be tracked--either through the GPS chip embedded in the gizmo, or by triangulating the cell signal. Defense contractor EWA Government Systems, Inc. makes a radio frequency-based "Bigfoot Remote Tagging System" that's the size of a couple of AA batteries. But the government has been working to make these terrorist tracking tags even smaller. (David Hambling and Noah Shachtman, "Inside the Military's Secret Terror-Tagging Tech," Wired, June 3, 2009)

Electronic Warfare Associates, Inc. (EWA) is a little-known Herndon, Virginia-based niche company comprised of nine separate operating entities "each with varying areas of expertise," according to the firm's website. Small by industry standards, EWA has annual revenue of some $20 million, Business First reports. According to Washington Technology, the firm provides "information technology, threat analysis, and test and evaluation applications" for the Department of Defense.

The majority of the company's products are designed for signals intelligence and surveillance operations, including the interception of wireless communications. According to EWA, its Bigfoot Remote Tagging System is "ideal" for "high-value target" missions and intelligence operations.

EWA however, isn't the only player in this deadly game. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's geek-squad, has been developing "small, environmentally robust, retro reflector-based tags that can be read by both handheld and airborne sensors at significant ranges," according to a presentation produced by the agency's Strategic Technology Office (STO).

Known as "DOTS," Dynamic Optical Tags, DARPA claims that the system is comprised of a series of "small active retroreflecting optical tags for 2-way data exchange." The tags are small, 25x25x25 mm with a range of some 10 km and a two month shelf-life; far greater than even the most sophisticated RFID tags commercially available today. Sold as a system possessing a "low probability of detection," the devices can be covertly planted around alleged terrorist safehouses--or the home of a political rival or innocent citizen--which can then be targeted at will by Predator or Reaper drones.

The Guardian revealed May 31 that over the last 18 months more than 50 CIA drone attacks have been launched against "high-value targets." The Pentagon claims to have killed nine of al-Qaeda's top twenty officials in north and south Waziristan. "That success" The Guardian avers, "is reportedly in part thanks to the mysterious electronic devices, dubbed 'chips' or 'pathrai' (the Pashto word for a metal device), which have become a source of fear, intrigue and fascination."

According to multiple reports by Western and South Asian journalists, CIA paramilitary officers or Special Operations commandos pay tribesmen to plant the devices adjacent to farmhouses sheltering alleged terrorists. "Hours or days later" The Guardian narrates, "a drone, guided by the signal from the chip, destroys the building with a salvo of missiles. 'There are body parts everywhere,' said Wazir, who witnessed the aftermath of a strike."

It is a high-tech assassination operation for one of the world's most remote areas.

The pilotless aircraft, Predators or more sophisticated Reapers, take off from a base in Baluchistan province.

But they are guided by a joystick-wielding operator half a world away, at a US air force base 35 miles north of Las Vegas. (Declan Walsh, "Mysterious 'chip' is CIA's latest weapon against al-Qaida targets hiding in Pakistan's tribal belt," The Guardian, May 31, 2009)

But while American operators may get their kicks unloading a salvo of deadly missiles on unsuspecting villagers thousands of miles away, what happens when CIA "cut-outs" get it wrong?

According to investigative journalist Amir Mir, writing in the Lahore-based newspaper The News, "of the sixty cross-border Predator strikes...between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US Predator strikes thus comes to not more than six percent."

So much for "precision bombing." But as CIA Director Leon Panetta recently told Congress, continued drone attacks are "the only game in town."

A "game" likely to reap tens of millions of dollars for enterprising corporate grifters. According to Wired, Sandia National Laboratories are developing "Radar Responsive" tags that are "a long-range version of the ubiquitous stick-on RFID tags used to mark items in shops."

A Sandia "Fact Sheet" informs us that "Radar-tag applications include battlefield situational awareness, unattended ground sensors data relay, vehicle tracking, search and recovery, precision targeting, special operations, and drug interdiction." Slap a tag on the car or embed one of the devilish devices in the jacket of a political dissident and bingo! instant "situational awareness" for Pentagon targeting specialists.

As Sandia securocrats aver, Radar Responsive tags can light up and locate themselves from twelve miles away thus providing "precise geolocation of the responding tag independent of GPS." But "what happens in Vegas" certainly won't stay there as inevitably, these technologies silently migrate into the heimat.

Homeland Security: Feeding the RFID Beast

One (among many) firms marketing a spin-off of Sandia's Radar Responsive tags is the Washington, D.C.-based Gentag. With offices in The Netherlands, Brazil and (where else!) Sichuan, China, the world capital of state-managed surveillance technologies used to crush political dissent, Gentag's are a civilian variant first developed for the Pentagon.

According to Gentag, "the civilian version (which still needs to be commercialized) is a lower power technology suitable for commercial civilian applications, including use in cell phones and wide area tracking." Conveniently, "Mobile reader infrastructure can be set up anywhere (including aircraft) or can be fixed and overlaid with existing infrastructure (e.g. cell phone towers)."

One member of the "Gentag Team" is Dr. Rita Colwell, the firm's Chief Science Advisor. Headquartered at the University of Maryland, College Park and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, according to a blurb on Gentag's website "Colwell will lead development of detection technologies that can be combined with cell phones for Homeland Security applications."

Another firm specializing in the development and marketing of RFID surveillance technologies is Inkode. The Vienna, Virginia-based company specializes in the development of low power devices "for integration into all types of products." According to a 2003 article in the RFID Journal, the firm has developed a method for "embedding very tiny metal fibers in paper, plastic and other materials that radio frequency waves can penetrate. The fibers reflect radio waves back to the reader, forming what Inkode calls a 'resonant signature.' These can be converted into a unique serial number."

Indeed, the fibers can be embedded in "paper, airline baggage tags, book bindings, clothing and other fabrics, and plastic sheet," Wired reported. "When illuminated with radar, the backscattered fields interact to create a unique interference pattern that enables one tagged object to be identified and differentiated from other tagged objects," the company says.

"For nonmilitary applications, the reader is less than 1 meter from the tag. For military applications, the reader and tag could theoretically be separated by a kilometer or more." The perfect accoutrement for a drone hovering thousands of feet above a target.

More recently, the RFID Journal reports that Queralt, a Wallingford, Connecticut-based start-up, received a Department of Homeland Security grant to design "an intelligent system that learns from data collected via RFID and sensors."

Tellingly, the system under development builds on the firm's "existing RFID technology, as well as an integrated behavioral learning engine that enables the system to, in effect, learn an individual's or asset's habits over time. The DHS grant was awarded based on the system's ability to track and monitor individuals and assets for security purposes," the Journal reveals.

And with a booming Homeland Security-Industrial-Complex as an adjunct to the defense industry's monetary black hole, its no surprise that Michael Queralt, the firm's cofounder and managing director told the publication, "The reason this development is interesting to us is it is very close to our heart in the way we are going with the business. We are developing a system that converges physical and logical, electronic security."

The core of Queralt's system is the behavioral engine that includes a database, a rules engine and various algorithms. Information acquired by reading a tag on an asset or an individual, as well as those of other objects or individuals with which that asset or person may come into contact, and information from sensors (such as temperature) situated in the area being monitored, are fed into the engine. The engine then logs and processes the data to create baselines, or behavioral patterns. As baselines are created, rules can be programmed into the engine; if a tag read or sensor metric comes in that contradicts the baseline and/or rules, an alert can be issued. Development of the behavioral engine is approximately 85 percent done, Queralt reports, and a prototype should be ready in a few months. (Beth Bacheldor, Queralt Developing Behavior-Monitoring RFID Software," RFID Journal, April 23, 2009)

Creating a "behavior fingerprint," Queralt says the technology will have a beneficial application in monitoring the elderly at home to ensure their safety. Homes are laced with humidity, temperature and motion-sensing tags that can for example, "sense when a medicine cabinet has been opened, or if a microwave oven has been operated." In other words, the Orwellian "behavioral engine" can learn what a person is doing on a regular basis.

But given the interest--and a $100,000 DHS grant, chump change by current Washington standards to be sure--corporate and intelligence agency clients have something far different in mind than monitoring the sick and the elderly!

Indeed, the RFID Journal reports that "a company could use the system, for instance, to monitor the behavior of employees to ensure no security rules are breached."

Want to surveil workers for any tell-tale signs of "antisocial behavior" such as union organizing? Then Queralt may have just the right tool for you! "The workers could be issued RFID-enabled ID badges that are read as they arrive at and leave work, enter and exit various departments, and log onto and off of different computer systems," the RFID Journal informs us. "Over time, the system will establish a pattern that reflects the employee's typical workday."

And if a worker "enters the office much earlier than normal on a particular occasion," or "goes into a department in which he or she does not work," perhaps to "coerce" others into joining "communist" unions opposed let's say, to widespread surveillance, the ubiquitous and creepy spy system "could send an alert."

Queralt is currently designing an application programming interface to "logical security and identity-management systems" from Microsoft and Oracle that will enable corporations to "tie the RFID-enabled behavioral system to their security applications."

The Future Is Now!

This brief survey of the national security state's deployment of a literally murderous, and privacy-killing, surveillance technology is not a grim, dystopian American future but a quintessentially American present.

The technological fetishism of Pentagon war planners and their corporate enablers masks the deadly realities for humanity posed by the dominant world disorder that has reached the end of the line as capitalism's long death-spiral threatens to drag us all into the abyss.

The dehumanizing rhetoric of RMA with its endless array of acronyms and "warfighting tools" that reduce waging aggressive imperialist wars of conquest to the "geek speak" of a video game, must be unmasked for what it actually represents: state killing on a massive scale.

Perhaps then, the victims of America's "war on terror," at home as well as abroad, will cease to be "targets" to be annihilated by automated weapons systems or ground down by panoptic surveillance networks fueled by the deranged fantasies of militarists and the corporations for whom product development is just another deadly (and very profitable) blood sport.

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Alan Watt mentioned this article in the following mp3:

June 17, 2009
Alan Watt "Cutting Through The Matrix" on RBN:
Military Intervention, Always Deception:
"Military-Industrial Complex is an Alliance,
Old Families, Big Business, Coupled with Science,
Pretending to Nations They're for Greater Good
As They Conquer with Bombs, Psychology and Food,
With Pompous Arrogance, Cunning and Greed,
They Own the Resources of All That You Need,
By Camouflage, Deception of True Intention,
War of Conquest Called 'Policing,' Intervention,
For 'Preventative Wars' They have a List,
'Before They're a Danger We Hit Them First,'
When it's All Over, the End of Each Nation,
Mankind Reduced to Manageable Population,
The Elite can Relax, Live Without Fear,
A Scientific Utopia, No Commoners Here"
***Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - June 17, 2009 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)
***LISTEN / DOWNLOAD

Topics of show covered in following links:
"Scientists faking results and omitting unwanted findings in research" by Richard Alleyne (telegraph.co.uk) - June 4, 2009.
"Swine flu diagnosis doubts prompt tests rethink" by Severin Carrell (guardian.co.uk) - June 17, 2009.
"Soya alert over cancer and brain damage link" by Antony Barnett (guardian.co.uk) - Aug. 13, 2000.
"Cause of increased cancer and infertility proven" by Gabriel O'Hara (wiseupjournal.com) - June 17, 2009.
"MI5 is attempting to recruit teachers as "spies" in a new recruitment drive" by Graeme Paton (telegraph.co.uk) - June 12, 2009.
"CIA and Pentagon Deploy RFID "Death Chips." Coming Soon to a Product Near You!" by Tom Burghardt (voltairenet.org) - June 16, 2009.

[matrixcutter]

Cash to become extinct as chips take off
By Anthony Keane
The Advertiser
June 15, 2009 06:00am

• Bank bosses foresee death of cash
• 'Cash to be replaced by microchips'
• More: Technology news and reviews

Extinct? ... bank bosses have predicted the decline of cash as transactions are done through microchips

CASH is accelerating down the path to extinction as new technologies threaten to mark the end of loose change within a decade.

Bank and credit union bosses say cash won't be alone, with wallets and credit cards also likely to disappear too.

They told The Advertiser's round table forum that cash and cards will be replaced by computer chips embedded in mobile phones, watches or other portable devices.

Australian Central chief executive Peter Evers believes cash will be replaced for most transactions in five-to-seven years.

"Cash will disappear as there will be other forms of carrying cash, stored value in your phone or whatever it might be. It will transfer automatically," he said.

"We're very close in countries around the world. If you go in to Hong Kong or Singapore, the low-value transactions have already disappeared. You can't go anywhere, like on public transport, without pre-purchasing a card.

"I think the Australian Payment Systems Board is very much on top of it and is trying to move down a path, but hasn't publicly put things into place yet."

BankSA general manager strategy and operations Chris Ward expects Australia to follow the offshore lead, with small cash transactions disappearing first.

"So you can't go and buy a bottle of water from the deli with cash; you've got to go and buy it with your chip," he said.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank state manager SA/NT John Oliver said it was easier for retailers to use electronic transactions than manual cash transactions.

Savings & Loans chief executive Greg Connor said the concept of the wallet would go.

"Whereas now we have a wallet and purse, it will be a chip in your phone or your watch or something like that as your access," he said.

Mr Evers said credit cards were on the way out as well.

"The access to credit is still going to be there through the mobile phone, but you don't need the card because that's really only a means of identification," he said.

"There could be another way of identifying, but the product, revolving credit, will still sit there."

-----

Alan Watt discussed this article in the following RBN show:

June 18, 2009
Alan Watt "Cutting Through The Matrix" on RBN:
Bigotry of Autocracy Pirating Your Privacy:
"Canada and U.S. Both on Par,
Give Power to Cyber Warfare Czar,
To Keep Us Secure, Themselves in Primacy,
We Should Give Up the Quaint Idea of Privacy
Which Seems 'Passed Down from Ancient Custom,'
We Needn't Fear Tyrants, We've Evolved, Trust 'em,
The Category 'Essential Privacy' is to Exist
For Government, CIA and the Very Rich,
Everyone Else Should Go with the Tide,
You Don't Need Privacy, 'less You've Something to Hide,'
The Road to Hell Paved with Good Intention,
We're Locked in Information Security Detention"
***Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - June 18, 2009 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)
***LISTEN / DOWNLOAD

Topics of show covered in following links:
"Will US Cyberwar Plan Compromise Privacy?" by Robert Charette (spectrum.ieee.org) - June 16, 2009.
"FORT DETRICK - Inventory Uncovers 9,200 More Pathogens" by Nelson Hernandez (washingtonpost.com) - June 18, 2009.
"ECOSPECTIVE: Londoner calls for inquiry into Gagetown Agent Orange" by Daniel O'Neail (londontopic.ca) - May 12, 2008.
"Agent Orange Alert" (agentorangealert.com).
"Cash to become extinct as chips take off" by Anthony Keane (news.com.au) - June 15, 2009.
"Young women 'lured into bankruptcy by celebrity lifestyle' " by Alastair Jamieson (telegraph.co.uk) - June 17, 2009.
"Experts Say Houston Dome May Help Environment" (huliq.com) - June 9, 2009.
"Social policy 'ruining childhood' " by Graeme Paton (telegraph.co.uk) - June 17, 2009.

[matrixcutter]

British Court Orders Singer Get "Medical Implant" for Drug Addiction
Infowars
June 12, 2009
Pete Doherty, singer for the English indie rock band Babyshambles, has been ordered to have a medical implant to prevent the use of drugs, according to the Associated Press. Doherty appeared in a Stroud, western England court today where he entered a plea of guilty to heroin possession and driving without a license or insurance.

It is not specified what sort of implant the British state demanded the rock singer receive.

Naltrexone, an opioid receptor antagonist, is often used for heroin addiction. Some practitioners use a naltrexone implant placed in the lower abdomen. The implant has not been shown scientifically to be successful in "curing" the subject of their addiction.

Implants are used for "medication compliance reasons."

[Mike Philbin]

look, even the Microsoft's XBOX360 mainstream gaming machine hardware interface Project Natal has "proven beyond reasonable doubt" that its full-body/full-movement biometric sourcing/billing + net integration solution is all you need for TOTAL ONLINE SAFETY and financial immersion in a cashless society. Nobody can mimick and copy what you are. Basic rule #1. Foolproof.

I don't know what the point of a penetrative sub-dermal RFID chip is, other than a corporate cyanide solution for dissidents or thinkers.

Mike

[khalil]

What do you suppose this ad is suggesting?

[matrixcutter]

Cashless Control Grid Inches Closer to Reality
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
June 19, 2009

Central bankers in Japan are mulling the abolition of cash. Richard Jerram, a senior economist with Macquarie bank, told investors that “the proposal has become practical with the broad penetration of electronic money and credit cards in Japan,” reports the Times Online. Bankers claim the scheme will rescue the economy from another deflationary spiral.


Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve make sure inflation ravages the economy at the behest of the bankers.

For more than a decade Japan has implemented “quantitative easing” — i.e., printing money out of thin air — as a way to fight deflation. Deflation effects the economy because consumers hold back from purchasing decisions, as they wait for cheaper prices. Economists believe that in Japan’s case nominal interest rates of -4 per cent might be required to “rescue” the economy from deflation.

In fact, bankers love inflation and that is why they are inventing schemes to combat deflation. “This new law [the Federal Reserve Act] will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation,” warned congressman Charles Lindbergh in 1913 on the eve of the passage of the Federal Reserve Act.

The trusts, or the criminal association of bankers, have consistently — and scientifically, as Lindbergh noted — imposed inflation since the Federal Reserve Act breezed through Congress in the dead of the night during Christmas recess in 1913.

Government loves inflation because it depends on it to finance its operations. Government requires an ever increasing amount of money to pay back an ever increasing amount of debt owed to the bankers. Fed mob boss Bernanke promised to keep the process going back in 2002 when he delivered a speech on combating deflation. After the speech, he received the moniker “Helicopter Ben” because he said the Federal Reserve had printing presses and could drop money from helicopters.

Japan will become the “testing ground” for the “outré” migration from physical fiat paper money to cashless digits, according to one Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi strategist. The plan is “in the realms of economic science fiction,” he said.

In addition of fine-tuning and tweaking the bankster control of monetary policy, the move toward a cashless society will allow the elite to control the masses to an extent previously only speculated upon in science fiction novels. The cashless society prophesized by our rulers fits right in with the choreographed move toward satellite and cellphone tracking, ubiquitous RFID chips, DARPA and NSA surveillance, the orchestrated end of Posse Comitatus and the federalization of local police and governments now well underway.

------------------------

From The Times
June 19, 2009
To fight deflation, abolish cash. Could Japan make reality of ‘science fiction’?
Leo Lewis Asia Business Correspondent

With recovery elusive, a population doddering into old age and perhaps a decade of deflation in prospect, Japan may start mulling the most radical monetary policy of all — the abolition of cash.

Unorthodox, untried and, said one Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi strategist, “in the realms of economic science fiction”, the recommendation has nevertheless begun floating around Tokyo’s corridors of power and economists have described Japan as particularly suitable as a testing ground.

The search for more outré economic policies continues, despite the recent surge in the Nikkei 225 index.The market may be reflecting soaring Chinese investment, rising consumer confidence and other cheerful data but economists see few long-term beacons of hope for Japan.

Other extreme ideas mooted by the financial authorities include a tax on physical currency or introducing one to operate alongside the yen.

All three ideas are based on a theory concerning interest rates and the concept that a nominal rate of zero — as Japan has now lived with for much of the past decade — may be too high. In Japan’s case, the theory would suggest that nominal rates of -4 per cent might be closer to what is required to rescue the economy from another deflationary spiral. Having agreed that this might be necessary, the next question is how it could be imposed.

Several MPs in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party believe the abolition of cash, though politically radioactive, might be technically feasible. Richard Jerram, a senior economist with Macquarie bank, told investors that “the proposal has become practical with the broad penetration of electronic money and credit cards in Japan”.

He said that all the proposals were radical but worth consideration for Japan. Without physical cash, a central bank can set rates exactly where it likes, runs the argument. Mr Jerram said: “At the heart of the problem of achieving negative nominal interest rates is the idea that physical currency is an anonymous bearer bond with a nominal interest rate of zero.” While a central bank can impose positive or negative rates on non-physical assets, transmitting those rates to physical currency is a huge challenge. By permanently removing cash from a system, he added, policymakers are robbed of the excuse that zero is the lowest that nominal rates can go as a deflation-fighting tool.

In theory, many Japanese could easily make the leap into a cashless world. The country has six main competing cashless payment systems, many of them embedded into mobile phones. Including Oyster-type cards issued by public transport companies, industry sources estimate that there are about 120 million cashless payment chips sitting in Japan’s wallets and handbags, waiting to be swiped.

Nevertheless, the country remains a wholeheartedly cash-based consumer society. Currency in circulation is about 16 per cent of its GDP, compared with the levels of 2 to 3 per cent in most developed countries. Reducing that 16 per cent to zero would be a wrench but would come with considerable benefits, Mr Jerram said.

But just as Japan’s cultural attachment to cash may prove hard to dislodge, some economists believe that the same may be true of deflation. The country’s growing population of elderly people mainly hold cash or cash equivalents and, compared with its US and European counterparts, the Bank of Japan has come under virtually no political pressure to be more belligerent in its war on deflation. It is unlikely, added Mr Jerram, to brook anything as radical as abolishing cash.

[sig_garrett]

If this is a duplicate URL my apologies. Technology can help or it can hurt.

Here's Lionhead Studios E3 2009: Project Natal Milo demo blurring virtual reality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPIbGnBQcJY

Further insertion into the technotronic matrix marches forward....

[khalil]

The Borg Agenda Trailer 1 of 3 (6mins 50s)
http://www.youtube.com/v/PIjt4-77Gqw&hl=en&fs=1&

This is the first trailer for my next film "The Borg Agenda, 7 of 9, and the Sexualization of Technology." This film will be a major work and I will probably upload it in 3 segments onto my website: www.lenonhonorfilms.com

An official release date has not been set but I am planning to premiere the film sometime in July. I will do my best to keep you updated. Join my forum at: http://lenonhonorfilms.com/phpBB3/

Peace.
-Lenon Honor

[matrixcutter]

India plans ID cards for its 1.1bn citizens
By Joe Leahy in Mumbai

Published: June 25 2009 20:00 | Last updated: June 25 2009 20:00

India’s government has launched one of the biggest bureaucratic exercises in the country’s history – the issue of a single identity card for each of its 1.1bn citizens.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the planning commission, said the scheme was part of the government’s “inclusive growth” programme aimed at penetrating India’s notorious red tape to deliver social services more directly to citizens, particularly those on the bottom rung of the economic ladder.

“Clearly such a platform, once it’s established, would be useful in a variety of ways for all kinds of agencies that deal with the public, for example, tax identification, drivers’ licences, beneficiaries of public services and beneficiaries of below-the-poverty-line services,” Mr Singh told the FT.

India is notorious for a cumbersome bureaucratic system inherited from British colonial rule that has become more internecine over the decades, making life difficult for the average citizen, particularly the poor and illiterate.

Different government agencies issue their own forms of ID and do not recognise those of other agencies or other states. It can be difficult for a person moving from one state to another to open bank accounts or have their driving licences recognised.

This has led to the kind of corruption and wastage that once compelled Rajiv Gandhi, prime minister until 1989, to complain that only 15 cents of every dollar spent by the government reached the poor.



The scheme will be run by a new agency, the Unique Identification Authority of India, and headed by Nandan Nilekani (pictured), co-founder of Infosys Technologies, India’s second-largest computer services outsourcing group, who will have the rank of cabinet minister.

The appointment of Mr Nilekani, one of India’s leading authors and thinkers, marks the first time one of the country’s new generation of technologists has been promoted to the top ranks of government.

The project envisages assigning an identity card with a unique number to every citizen by 2011 and aims at doing away with multiple identification cards.

“I see this as an instrument of empowerment,” Mr Nilekani told the FT. “At the moment everyone’s reinventing the wheel in terms of identifying people. Especially for the poor, they have the most difficulty getting themselves identified.”

India’s opposition National Democratic Alliance had mooted a proposal when it was in power in 2002 to introduce multi-purpose identity cards to check infiltration from neighbouring countries into India and to tackle terrorism. However, the country’s leftist parties, which have benefited from the support of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, objected. .

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Centre for Policy Research, a Delhi-based think tank, said that although there were security and privacy issues involved, a single identity card was an “overwhelming necessity”.

Additional reporting by Varun Sood

-------------------------

ID cards for India: 1.1billion citizens will go into second largest citizens' database
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 1:08 PM on 28th June 2009

India is planning to provide its 1.1 billion-plus citizens with ID cards.


Project leader: Nandan Nilekani

Entrepreneur, Nandan Nilekani has been chosen to lead the ambitious project which will be the second largest citizens' database in a democracy, with China being the biggest.

The government believes the scheme, which will be finalised over three years, will aid the delivery of vital social services to the poorest people who often lack sufficient identification papers.

It also sees the scheme as a way to tackle increasing amounts of identity fraud and theft and, at a time of increased concern over the threat of militant violence, to boost national security and help police and law officials.

Like Britain's £5billion ID cards plan, due to roll out in 2011/12, India's scheme is not without controversy.

Observers have raised questions including how the cards will actually improve the delivery of services and also concerns that the scheme could be disruptive.

In an interview in The Independent today associate fellow of the Asia programme at Chatham House, Charu Lata Hogg, said: 'It cannot be denied that the system of proving identity in India is complicated and confusing.

'But a system of national ID cards can technically introduce a new route to citizenship.

'This could be used as a security measure by the government which leaves migrant workers, refugees and other stateless people in India in limbo without access to public services, employment and basic welfare.'

-----

Alan Watt discussed the above article in the following RBN show:

June 29, 2009
Alan Watt "Cutting Through The Matrix" on RBN:
Problems Solved by 'Highly Evolved':
"Lots of Videos for Public to See,
With Rothschild, Strong, Saying How it's to be,
Creating Enviro-Banks with Themselves in Control,
Profiting from Misery as They Tax the Poor Prole,
Government like Money is Just a Tool,
Rich Select Head Man, Any Old Fool,
Whether Slow of Speech or Quick of Wit,
Just as Long as He can Follow a Script,
The Black Humour of Carbon Set to Pave
An Impoverished Planet, Each One a Slave,
Amidst All Squalor, the Rich Live of Course,
In Advanced Supercities, Owning Each Resource"
***Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - June 29, 2009 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)
***LISTEN / DOWNLOAD

Topics of show covered in following links:
Video: "George Hunt: UN UNCED Earth Summit 1992 (Population reduction, Bank Scams etc..) - 36:58" [Video Clips of Rothschild and Strong at Environment Meetings.] (video.google.com) - June 6, 2006.
"Rothschild and Freshfields founders linked to slavery" by Carola Hoyos (ft.com) - June 26 2009.
"Obama's involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange--the rest of the story" by Judi McLeod (canadafreepress.com) - March 25, 2009.
"Pentagon Rebrands Protest as 'Low-Level Terrorism' " by Tom Burghardt (dissidentvoice.org) - June 19, 2009.
"ACLU Challenges Defense Department Personnel Policy To Regard Lawful Protests As 'Low-Level Terrorism' " (aclu.org) - June 10, 2009.
"ID cards for India: 1.1billion citizens will go into second largest citizens' database" (dailymail.co.uk) - June 28, 2009.
"Henry Waxman's betrayal of our existence - HR 2749" by Scaredhuman (dailykos.com) - June 17, 2009.

[matrixcutter]

Propaganda Piece:

The cover charge at this club? An RFID implant
Mon Jun 29, 2009 6:03PM EDT

It works for Fido, so why not you?

The same RFID implants used to identify lost pets are now being adapted for use on you and me, and not how one might have originally expected. As with all pioneering technologies, it's leisure pursuits that are getting the first stab at the tech.

Specifically: One beach-oriented Barcelona nightclub, the Baja Beach Club, is using the implants to free customers of the burdens of having to carry their purses or wallets. Makes sense: When you're spending the day in a bikini and flip-flops, where do you keep your ID? Instead, the bouncer just scans your arm with an RFID reader, and you're in. And since you can't carry a credit card or cash either, the implants do double duty: You can pay for drinks with a quick scan of the chip. Chipped patrons also gain access to VIP areas of the club.

The implant procedure is simple and mostly painless (except for all the legal paperwork required): The area where the chip is injected is thoroughly numbed, then the glass capsule is injected beneath a layer of skin and fat on the arm.

It's an interesting experiment, and I'm intrigued to see whether the idea will catch on. The catch, of course, becomes what will happen if a lot of clubs in one area decide to do this. One RFID chip under the skin is probably an interesting conversation piece. A dozen in one arm might make you walk funny. Obviously the one-chip-per-establishment system isn't really sustainable in the long run.

Could someone come along and develop a broad human RFID chip standard? Such plans have been being talked about for years, but nothing much has ever come of it. Naturally, security implications are huge: RFID tags can be scanned, copied, and altered by savvy hackers, and it would be a simple matter for a wily crook to scan people en masse as they pass through, say, the entrance of a mall. It's one thing if they're making off with free drinks on your dime, another if they can suck your life away with the wave of a wand.

Pro or con? Well... it's something to think and talk about while you're doing all that drinking!

-----

We can expect dozens of these in the near future.

[matrixcutter]

Japan Unveils Mind Control Robot (Video)
2009 06 28

In Japan scientists at the Honda Research Institute have unveiled the world's first brain to machine interface. Dubbed BMI short for Brain Machine Interface this new technology system will enable people to control robots using their mind.

Pushing buttons and fiddling with levers to control a robot could be a thing of the past. Honda's new system works using a brain activity measuring device that sends signals to their famous ASIMO humanoid robot.

As a user imagines moving a body part, sensors placed on the head measure and analyze the slight waves and blood flow changes in the brain. This allows the robot to make corresponding movements such as raising its arm or leg.

Honda hopes to incorporate the technology into a variety of human-friendly products in the future.

[Tatsuya Okube, Honda Research]: "As you know, we are, we are fundamental researchers so now we are, we are challenging to release some new technology. So unfortunately now we cannot expect when we can release BMI (Brain Machine Interface) as a product."

Japan is now home to almost half of the world's 800,000 industrial robots. This massive robot population is expected to turn into a 10 billion U.S. dollar industry in the future.

Video from: youtube.com

-----

Related:

Toyota to introduce home robots by 2010 (Video)
"BigDog" Walks on any Terrain, Shockingly Creepy Gait (Video)
Brain Machine Interfaces
Machines 'to match man by 2029'
The Global Brain (Video)
Red Ice Radio - Kevin Warwick - Artificial Intelligence & The Rise of the Machines in 2020
The next big bang: Man meets machine
Neuroimaging Of Brain Shows Who Spoke To A Person And What Was Said
Scientists: Humans and machines will merge in future
U.S. Army Research Office Spend $4 million to Study Synthetic Telepathy
Is Computer Use Changing Children?
Transgressive technologies: Does a posthuman dystopia await us?
2057 - Part 1 - The Body (Video)
2057 - Part 2 - The City (Video)

[matrixcutter]

A robot displaying human emotion has been unveiled
Kobian, a "humanoid" robot, which can express seven human emotions, has been unveiled by researchers at Waseda University in Japan.
 
By Emma Barnett, Technology and Digital Media Correspondent
Published: 4:05PM BST 23 Jun 2009



The Emotional Humanoid Robot can express seven different feelings, including delight, surprise, sadness and dislike. In addition to assuming different poses to match the mood, Kobian uses motors in its face to move its lips, eyelids and eyebrows into various positions, according to pinktentacle.

To express delight, for example, the robot its hands over its head and opens it mouth and eyes wide.

To show sadness, Kobian hunches over, hangs its head and holds a hand up to its face in a gesture of grief.

Kobian can also walk around, perceive its environment and perform physical tasks. The robot features a double jointed neck that helps it achieve more expressive postures.

It was developed and unveiled by researchers at Waseda’s Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering in Tokyo on Tuesday June 23.

They were led by Professor Atsuo Takanashi, and worked with robot manufacturer Tmsuk, based in Kitakyushu, southern Japan.

According to Kobian’s developers, the robot’s expressiveness makes it more equipped to interact with humans and assist with daily activities.

There are plans for it to be further developed and then possibly deployed into the field of nursing.

-----

Related Articles

Robot model debuts on Tokyo Fashion Week runway
Robot teacher conducts first class in Tokyo school
Japanese catwalk robot unveiled
Light therapy offers 'non-invasive' treatment for breast cancer
Robotic ferret is newest defence against smugglers

[matrixcutter]

Media Propaganda: Yahoo Tech Rehashes Human RFID Implants for Beach Nightclub Story

Harold Grey
JustGetThere
Tuesday June 30th, 2009

In a seemingly innocuous manner, Yahoo Tech is promoting the human microchipping agenda of the elite, by rehashing an almost five year old story of a Barcelona nightclub offering RFID chipping for VIP access.

The writer makes it seem like a fun interesting new fad for the tech driven cyber-youth, who have been scientifically manipulated to voluntarily plug themselves into the tracking, tracing, cashless society matrix, erected for consolidated control over an unsuspecting population.

The article presents the idea of human chipping for a nightclub, as if it’s the next logical step for tech consumers seeking the latest in ultimate convenience.

Below is an excerpt:

“the Baja Beach Club, is using the implants to free customers of the burdens of having to carry their purses or wallets. Makes sense: When you’re spending the day in a bikini and flip-flops, where do you keep your ID? Instead, the bouncer just scans your arm with an RFID reader, and you’re in. And since you can’t carry a credit card or cash either, the implants do double duty.”


With this logic, I guess all the patrons either live in walking distance of the club, or hitchhike since they can’t carry keys.

The tech writer had previously covered the story of RFID implants in 2006, presenting the subject with a more balanced approach, pointing out health and privacy concerns. He also seemed to have no clue that human chipping had already took place years before his blog entry. With foreknowledge of the subject, it’s curious that this old news item would be written about, instead of more recent accounts of the alarming negative capabilities of human microchipping.  Edward Bernays’ style marketing, used to introduce the idea of being chipped as the next social fad for the hipsters. Subtly implanting images of girls needing this device because they are half naked, and being a VIP at a nightclub, seems to be the preferred marketing script used to introduce the human microchipping agenda to the public.

This seems to be classic

Bernays’ succinctly explains the molding of the publics mind in this quote:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.”
- Edward Bernays

There is absolutely no reason to rehash this story, especially since he hasn’t introduced anything we didn’t know four plus years ago. With the subject being promoted during the summer, it introduces the idea in a contextual manner that relates to the reader. Readers can easily envision themselves at beaches, leisurely making purchases carrying nothing but a tan. Communicating the idea of human chipping through the use of positive imagery, is an effective method that allows the reader to imagine daily use of this technology.

The move towards a cashless society has been steadily advancing over the last decade with several milestones, like the first Internet only virtual banks. The European Visa chief stated in 2007 that “the cashless society will arrive by 2012″, warning that, “retailers could soon start surcharging customers if they choose to buy products with cash, because of the greater cost of processing these payments.”

The plan for a cashless society seems to be on schedule as a solution to the current global financial crisis, Japan has pitched the idea of abolishing cash to fight deflation. Japan’s nominal rate of interest has been at zero interest for the last decade. The theory is that a -4 nominal rate of interest would be needed, and could only be achieved through the abolishment of cash. Richard Jerram, a senior banking economist states, “the proposal has become practical with the broad penetration of electronic money and credit cards in Japan.”

He also correctly points out the potential for absolute financial power, and unnatural numerical manipulation of interest markets by central bankers.

Via Times Online:

Without physical cash, a central bank can set rates exactly where it likes, runs the argument. Mr Jerram said: “At the heart of the problem of achieving negative nominal interest rates is the idea that physical currency is an anonymous bearer bond with a nominal interest rate of zero.” While a central bank can impose positive or negative rates on non-physical assets, transmitting those rates to physical currency is a huge challenge. By permanently removing cash from a system, he added, policymakers are robbed of the excuse that zero is the lowest that nominal rates can go as a deflation-fighting tool.

The elite banking cabal has been striving for the ultimate cashless system that can only be accessed by microchips in your body. This nightmarish, digital panopticon singularity, will allow for absolute control, unlimited profit, and oversight of all transactions, with ability to adjust your taxing rate on the fly, based on your actions or purchases. The all knowing, inescapable, tyrannical manifestation ruled by the elite banking oligarchy, will dictate world commerce through the power of invisible credits, created by digital ones and zeros.

Hollywood director and documentary filmmaker, Aaron Russo, who lost his battle with cancer in 2007, revealed knowledge of such a plan. He learned of this through personal conversations with Nick Rockefeller.

In one conversation Russo said:

“I used to say to him what’s the point of all this,” states Russo, “you have all the money in the world you need, you have all the power you need, what’s the point, what’s the end goal?” Rockefeller replied (paraphrasing), “The end goal is to get everybody chipped, to control the whole society, to have the bankers and the elite people control the world.”

Complete control of the economic and social systems is one thing, but recently an even more nefarious use arose, the ability to remotely cause death via a release of Cyanide. Recently, a Saudi Arabian inventor applied for a patent in Germany for the ‘Killer Chip’. The technology also has the ability to relay the geographical location of the chipped high tech slave through encrypted radio waves transmitted to satellites. Although this patent was rejected in Germany, normally inventors apply in several countries so it could still become a reality.

The ability to kill you overtly with a patented cyanide pill may have been refuted, but patents exist that allow for the delivery of drugs through a preprogrammed microprocessor, remote control, or by biosensors. So in the foreseeable future, various functions of commerce, surveillance, identification, and medical uses could be consolidated into one implantable device, an iChip.

Incrementally, society is being primmed for the for an inescapable cashless control grid, that can track your location, administer drugs and potentially exterminate you remotely. The technology capabilities are here, the managing infrastructure is being built and the deceptive PR push for public acceptance, is what we face now. Constant articles about the RFID implants for VIP clubbing, further introduces the idea of human chipping as convenient, safe, and the next hot tech trend. Without mentioning of any of the concerns listed above, or the various documented cases of chips causing malignant tumors and cancer in laboratory rodents and dogs. The Yahoo article even starts out by saying, “It works for Fido, so why not you?” Well, it may have worked for Fido, but it didn’t work for Charlie Brown, a purebred Chihuahua. Recently, a dog bled to death in the arms of his distraught owners, after a legislated mandatory microchip procedure in Los Angeles.

The expanding uses of human microchipping is a dangerous trend, even lawmakers have acknowledged the potential for abuse with the introduction of legislative bills that would prevent the forced microchipping of humans.

The deceptive PR campaign of calmly introducing human RFID chipping through the mainstream press as a convenient tool for the tech savvy social elite, is a false reality that we must reject wholeheartedly as sovereign members of a free society.

-------------------------

1 July 2009
RFID Implants for Humans Hyped On Yahoo Tech
www.voltairenet.org



It works for Fido, so why not you?

The same RFID implants used to identify lost pets are now being adapted for use on you and me, and not how one might have originally expected. As with all pioneering technologies, it’s leisure pursuits that are getting the first stab at the tech.

Specifically: One beach-oriented Barcelona nightclub, the Baja Beach Club, is using the implants to free customers of the burdens of having to carry their purses or wallets. Makes sense: When you’re spending the day in a bikini and flip-flops, where do you keep your ID? Instead, the bouncer just scans your arm with an RFID reader, and you’re in. And since you can’t carry a credit card or cash either, the implants do double duty: You can pay for drinks with a quick scan of the chip. Chipped patrons also gain access to VIP areas of the club.

The implant procedure is simple and mostly painless (except for all the legal paperwork required): The area where the chip is injected is thoroughly numbed, then the glass capsule is injected beneath a layer of skin and fat on the arm.

It’s an interesting experiment, and I’m intrigued to see whether the idea will catch on. The catch, of course, becomes what will happen if a lot of clubs in one area decide to do this. One RFID chip under the skin is probably an interesting conversation piece. A dozen in one arm might make you walk funny. Obviously the one-chip-per-establishment system isn’t really sustainable in the long run.

Could someone come along and develop a broad human RFID chip standard? Such plans have been being talked about for years, but nothing much has ever come of it. Naturally, security implications are huge: RFID tags can be scanned, copied, and altered by savvy hackers, and it would be a simple matter for a wily crook to scan people en masse as they pass through, say, the entrance of a mall. It’s one thing if they’re making off with free drinks on your dime, another if they can suck your life away with the wave of a wand.

Pro or con? Well... it’s something to think and talk about while you’re doing all that drinking!

-----

Alan Watt discussed the above article in the following RBN show:

July 6, 2009
Alan Watt "Cutting Through The Matrix" on RBN:
Masters 'Correct' the Percept:
"Take a Little Time of Introspection,
Find Who's Playing with Your Perception,
Events Unforeseen Simply Unfold,
Experts Act on the Spot, so We're Told,
Yet Declassified Info Seems So Damning,
With Powerful Think-Tanks in Future Planning,
They've Political Agendas, Though Unelected,
Massive Financing, Well Protected,
Distorting Reality with Well-Crafted Word,
Mixing Truth with Deception, Perception is Blurred"
(Article: "RFID Implants for Humans Hyped On Yahoo Tech" (voltairenet.org) - July 1, 2009.)
***Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - July 6, 2009 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)
***LISTEN / DOWNLOAD

[matrixcutter]

Wednesday, October 22. 2008
Pennsylvania Lawmaker Joins Movement To Ban Forced RFID Implants

State Rep. Babette Josephs, D-Phila., has introduced legislation that would make it illegal to implant any identification device on or under a person’s skin that would contain and transmit personal information.

By Harold Gray


RFID chart sourced from CNET

Just Get There | The thought of any government or corporation forcing humans to take implantable RFID chips, sounds like an Orwellian sci-fi movie. In reality, it is in fact happening in this post 9/11, brave new world of trading liberty for security.

Verichip Corp. states on their website, "the need of implantable chips arose from the events of September 11th, when New York firemen were writing their badge ID numbers on their chests in case they were found injured or unconscious." The day after 9/11 is used as an excuse for dismantling many of our Constitutional liberties through legislation, and social engineering the public to accept it through the use of media propaganda.

The news of voluntary implantable RFID chips has been reported in several positive media campaigns, specifically directed to calm the public, and incrementally sell them on the idea of safety, especially in cases of kidnapping or mental ills such as Alzheimer's disease. Other campaigns focused on the chips being a new "fashion trend", by using them for VIP access in hot night clubs. In contrast, the mainstream media has historically glossed over the forced implementation of implantable chips by corporations, government entities or military personnel.

Overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA approved human RFID implants in January of 2005. During the time of VeriChip's approval, DHHS was headed by Tommy Thompson. Just two weeks after the device's approval, Thompson left the DHHS, and within five months, became a board member of VeriChip Corp. and Applied Digital Solutions, receiving compensation with cash and stock options. He proceeded to go on a national media campaign, suggesting every American should be implanted with VeriMed chips for access to personal medical data, even saying he would have it implanted himself.

In 2006, the first example of using implantable RFID chips to identify a person, occurred in a US company in Ohio called City-Watcher. Three workers, including the CEO and founder, Sean Darks, had the chips embedded under the skin of their forearms, which they swipe across a reader in order to gain access to the company's data center. The company provides surveillance cameras and Internet monitoring for police departments in high-crime areas for a number of cities. Darks goal was to control employee access to areas in which data, and images are stored for use by city police departments.

Privacy advocate Katherine Albrecht, who co-authored the book "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID.", responded to the news by saying "the fear is that the government or your employer might someday say, 'Take a chip or starve."' The same sentiment was echoed by several other civil libertarians, Christian conservatives and members of the ACLU.

The Pentagon has expressed interest in microchipping soldiers in order to access medical data for battlefield injuries and casualties. A $1.6 million dollar contract was awarded to Clemson University's, Center for Bioelectronics, Biosensors and Biochips; the University of Alabama at Birmingham; and Telesensors Inc., of Knoxville, Tenn. Researchers from Clemson state they are now 4 years away from human trials which would include a new gel specially created to minimize rejection from the human body.

Microchipping the Troops (2mins 28s)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYUlCKFHeAQ

The idea of privacy is just one cause of concern for RFID implants, dating back to the mid 90's, research studies showed the implants induced cancer malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats. Keith Johnson, retired toxicology pathologist from Dow Chemical, stated in an interview with the AP that his findings proved "The transponders were the cause of the tumors."

The negative news swirling around cancer links with their implantable chips, led to a steep dive in their stock price in 2008. This resulted in Scott R. Silverman stepping down as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer in July of 2008. For thirteen years he held top positions at the parent company Applied Digital Solutions, and it's various subsidiaries. In conjunction with his departure, VeriChip sold it's Canadian subsidiary, Xmark, to Stanley Canada Company for $47.9 million. Xmark is comprised of RFID-based products designed to help track infants in hospitals, as well as other patients and physical assets within the medical community.

VeriChip did not benefit financially from the sale of Xmark or it's HealthLink direct-to-consumer marketed chips. Thus, shares plunged from it's 52 week high of $4.19 to as low as 30 cents a share, now currently hovering around 40 cents a share. These massive financial losses have crippled the once feared harbinger of the "Mark of the Beast".

Taking advantage of the current financial position of VeriChip, a watchdog group of privacy advocates, are working towards forcing VeriChip into bankruptcy by exposing the privacy and health concerns surrounding the implants. Mark Dice, spokesperson for The Resistance, a privacy watchdog group based in San Diego stated “These chips were first used for identifying pets and livestock, and now they’re being pushed onto the public as a safety device in this age of terrorism and fear.” “We are human beings, not animals or pieces of inventory, and we urge everyone to resist such technology.”

Biden Confirmation (21s)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbPvWm9ZkYw

During the Senate confirmation of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, Vice-Presidential Candidate Joe Biden, brings up the issue of tracking humans with forced implantable chips.

Even more disturbing, is the evidence some researchers have uncovered, revealing a master plan by elite bankers, to forcibly microchip the population in order to gain ultimate control of society. The chip would be used as a monetary device for all transactions, and could be easily tracked, traced and regulated. Hollywood director and documentary filmmaker, Aaron Russo, who lost his battle with cancer in 2007, revealed knowledge of such a plan. He learned of this through personal conversations with Nick Rockefeller.

In one conversation Russo said, "I used to say to him what's the point of all this," states Russo, "you have all the money in the world you need, you have all the power you need, what's the point, what's the end goal?" Rockefeller replied (paraphrasing), "The end goal is to get everybody chipped, to control the whole society, to have the bankers and the elite people control the world."

The video below is an excerpt from an interview with Russo by Alex Jones (14mins 58s)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1263677258215075609

Many states have taken action to prevent the possibility of force chip implants with legislation. On Jan 1, 2008, California joined Wisconsin and Nebraska with laws preventing chipping without consent. The latest state bill banning forced chipping was introduced in Pennsylvania by D-Rep. Babette Josephs.

In her press release Josephs states:

"Maintaining our personal and our family’s privacy is becoming increasingly difficult," Josephs said. 'Any positive impact that an implanted device could have would be eclipsed by the potential damage that could be done if the information was accessed by an outside party not intended to have the information. Moreover some of this information should not be collected by government either. "Government organizations, independent researchers, members of the technology industry and civil liberties watchdog groups have all expressed concern about the personal security threat posed by such an action."

In the past, such talk of humans being microchipped voluntarily or forcibly, was ridiculed by many as "tin foil hat" conspiracy. It is now a reality, incrementally being directed at security sensitive jobs, or accessing patient information in the medical field. The introduction of legislation by states, and increased public awareness of the wide range of concerns surrounding human implants, should curtail the push for such devices that can do significant harm under the pretense of doing good.

[khalil]

A robot displaying human emotion has been unveiled
Kobian, a "humanoid" robot, which can express seven human emotions, has been unveiled by researchers at Waseda University in Japan.

Here is a download for the video footage of the emotional robot from the above Telegraph article.

A Robot Displaying Human Emotions (1:35 min, 13.8 mb)

[matrixcutter]

The end of ID cards? Now Government reveals they WON'T be compulsory
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 11:43 PM on 30th June 2009

British citizens will never be forced to carry ID cards, the Government announced today.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson said that a trial scheme that was to force some airport staff to carry the controversial cards has been scrapped.

The massive climbdown means that carrying an ID card will now never be made compulsory for members of the general public.

The move signals the end of one of Labour's most controversial policies, which has been championed by a succession of Home Secretaries, and threatens to further undermine the authority of the Prime Minister.

And the retreat will be seized upon by Opposition parties and campaigners who have argued the £5billion scheme is unnecessary and excessively expensive.

Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling accused the Government of an 'absurd fudge' over the decision.

Insisting that ID cards should be voluntary, Mr Johnson said: 'Holding an identity card should be a personal choice for British citizens - just as it is now to obtain a passport.'

Previously, ministers said ID cards could become compulsory once 80 per cent of the population was covered.


Jacqui Smith unveils the ID card in September last year - six months after conceding that they would not be compulsory after all

The cards were being trialled at  Manchester Airport and London City Airport prior to a national roll-out but that trial has now been cancelled, Mr Johnson said.

The announcement means that foreign nationals in the UK will be the only group of people who will be forced to carry the cards.

'This decision is symbolic of a Government in chaos,' Mr Grayling said.

'They have spent millions on the scheme so far - the Home Secretary thinks it has been a waste and wants to scrap it, but the prime minister won't let him.

'So we end up with an absurd fudge instead. This is no way to run the country.'

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said: 'This is another nail in the coffin for the Government's illiberal ID cards policy, which will soon be so voluntary that only Home Office mandarins seeking promotion will have them.

'Airport workers did not want to be guinea pigs for this deeply unpopular scheme, which has now been reduced to nothing more than a second-rate passport.

'These expensive and intrusive plans should be ditched now.'

The decision to scrap compulsory ID cards is just the latest - and most embarrassing - of a series of humiliating climbdowns by the Government.

Last week saw Brown perform a U-turn over whether or not the inquiry into the Iraq would be held in private.

And in May, Jack Straw had to drop plans to allow inquest to be held in private.

Last month it was revealed that the bill for issuing ID cards and passports over the next ten years is now £4.945billion for UK citizens and £379million for foreign nationals.

The rollout of the ID card scheme will now be accelerated on a purely voluntary basis for UK citizens at £30 per card, starting in Greater Manchester by the end of the year.

Mr Johnson said: 'I want the introduction of identity cards for all British citizens to be voluntary and I have therefore decided that identity cards issued to airside workers, planned initially at Manchester and London City airports later this year, should also be voluntary.'

Asked if the cards would ever be made compulsory he said: 'No'.

'If a future Government wanted to make them compulsory it would require primary legislation,' he added.


Charles Clarke was just one of a number of Home Secretaries who championed the identity cards.

Mr Johnson said he still believed the cards would help improve security at airports.

But he admitted the Government had allowed the perception that the cards would be a 'panacea' that would stop terrorism.

Mr Johnson said he was an 'instinctive' supporter of ID cards and said he wanted to 'accelerate' the delivery of the cards.

A pilot scheme covering Greater Manchester will be extended to the whole of the North West of England from early next year, Mr Johnson said.

Everyone who wants a card, or a biometric passport, will have their details stored on the national identity register.

Former shadow home secretary David Davis said: 'Alan Johnson has signalled the final stages of the descent into chaos of the Government's ID card scheme.

'The cancellation of the compulsory air-side workers test of the scheme, in the face of fierce resistance from pilots and trade unions, shows that the Home Office had lost their stomach for the fight.

'The abandonment of the requirement for the ID card to be compulsory as the final stage shows the Government has lost its belief in the ID card as a universal check on identity.

'One of the fundamental design flaws in the system was that it had to be compulsory for it to work as advertised.

'Otherwise, how could any public servant, be they police, immigration officer, or welfare provider, demand to see it?

'Whilst it is welcome that Alan Johnson recognises that the British people will not be compelled to accept this intrusive gimmick, he should also understand that this marks the death knell of this ill-conceived scheme.'

Civil liberties groups said this amounted to a compulsory scheme.

Isabella Sankey, director of policy for Liberty, said: 'The Home Secretary needs to be clear as to whether entry on to the National Identity Register will continue to be automatic when applying for a passport.

'If so, the identity scheme will be compulsory in practice. However you spin it, big ears, four legs and a long trunk still make an elephant.

'And this white elephant would be as costly to privacy and race equality as to our purses.'

The scheme has been mired in controversy ever since its launch, coming under fire from all angles as politicians tried to present it as a solution to multiple problems.

It has been proposed as a way of countering terrorism, identity theft and misuse of public services and also as a way of proving the carrier's age and identity generally.

ID cards were enshrined in the Identity Cards Act 2006 and major contracts were to have been awarded by the end of this year for design, production and rollout.

Cards are linked to the National Identity Register, a centralised database intended to hold information such as fingerprints, facial and iris scans, past and present addresses.


NO2I.D. campaigners stage a naked protest in Parliament Square in October 2005

Crucially, the databanks would be indexed to other Government records, allowing them to be cross-referenced.

The register has been pilloried by civil liberties campaigners as an Orwellian tool of state power that would be easily open to abuse.

ID cards were  first mooted as a voluntary scheme by Michael Howard, Home Secretary under John Major.

At the time Tony Blair, then in Opposition, attacked it as a waste of resources that would be better spent putting more police officers on the streets.

But New Labour revived the idea and ramped it up in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington DC - proposing that identity cards should be compulsory.

David Blunkett, then Home Secretary, put the scheme out to consultation in July the following year and gave the go-ahead in 2003.

By that time doubts had surfaced about its effectiveness against terrorism. The official name, 'entitlement cards', was dropped as being too euphemistic.

In the immediate wake of the July 7 attacks in London, Mr Blunkett's successor Charles Clarke admitted he did not believe ID cards would have prevented the atrocities.

In August 2005 Tony McNulty, the Minister in charge of the scheme, apologised for 'overselling' its benefits.

He admitted in a private Whitehall seminar: 'Perhaps, in the past, the Government in its enthusiasm oversold the advantages of identity cards.

'We did suggest, or at least implied, that they may well be a panacea for identity fraud, benefit fraud, terrorism, entitlement and access to public services.

'Perhaps we ran away with it in our enthusiasm. I apologise for us overselling the case for ID cards.'

When it was revealed that scanners designed to read the cards would not be able to identify Islamic terror suspects because of key technical difficulties, MPs declared the scheme 'a farce'.

Jacqui Smith launched a mock-up of the card in September last year - but that was six months after she admitted it would no longer be compulsory.

Non-EU foreign nationals living in Britain have already been issued with ID cards.

According to plans, around 20,000 people working airside at London City and Manchester Airports would have been required to carry the cards.

The Unite union which represents many of the workers, welcomed the move.

National officer Brian Boyd said: 'The continued persistence of Unite in highlighting the unworkable elements of this scheme, has paid-off.

'Our approach in pursuing the Government on behalf of many thousands of airside workers who would have been disadvantaged by the introduction of ID cards, has been fully vindicated.

'National safety very often begins at UK airports, and our members who work airside are in the frontline in this respect. However, the Government's plans were flawed, thankfully today's announcement by the Home Secretary is the sensible choice.'

Next year young people opening bank accounts are to be encouraged to obtain ID cards and over the following two years anyone getting a passport will get one - but can opt out.

The cost of the cards per person was given as £77 in 2004, then as £93 in July 2005. But research by the London School of Economics put it at a massive £230 a head.

ID CARDS TIMELINE

Identity cards were first introduced in Britain during the Second World War as a way of protecting the nation against Nazi spies.

The compulsory scheme was scrapped in 1952 on the grounds that they were not needed during peacetime.

The idea of reintroducing them has been raised numerous times by governments in recent years but the idea has always prompted controversy and opposition from civil liberties campaigners.

They have become a hot topic since a re-introduction was first discussed in the 1990s.

1995

John Major's Conservative government issues a consultation paper on the idea of ID cards but later drops the idea.

1998

Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw raises the idea of a national ID card scheme but is persuaded against it.

2001

Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett suggests an ID card scheme could be used as a means of tackling terrorism, immigration and identity fraud.

2002

The Government publishes Entitlement Cards and Identity Fraud: A Consultation Paper to seek public views.

2003

Mr Blunkett says the public appear to back the idea of a identity card.

2004

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas warns that the cards would be seen as a 'gold standard' of identification, potentially attracting counterfeiters while giving society a false sense of security.

He tells the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee that he is concerned that human and computer error could introduce mistakes which have a serious impact on individuals.

Mr Thomas later tells The Times: 'My anxiety is that we don't sleepwalk into a surveillance society where much more information is collected about people, accessible to far more people shared across many more boundaries than British society would feel comfortable with.'

2005

Home Office minister Andy Burnham says UK identity cards will allow people to leave their passports at home if they are travelling within the EU from 2008.

His comments are dismissed by human rights group Liberty which says his comments are 'yet another desperate attempt to sell Tony Blair's £10billion white elephant'.

Opposition politicians brand the Government's plans for a national identity card scheme farcical' after Home Office minister Tony McNulty concedes that 13 biometric features will be used as people might be identified inaccurately on the basis of one check.

The legislation is passed by MPs and introduced in the Lords for debate. The House of Lords' Constitution Committee warns the planned introduction of identity cards 'fundamentally alters the relationship between the citizen and the State'.

2006

The House of Lords refuses to back the scheme and the Government announces compromises which mean it will have to introduce a new Bill before ID cards can be made compulsory, and agrees to report to MPs every six months on the price tag.

Peers finally accept a compromise deal, ending a stand-off with the Government which had seen them reject legislation five times. The Lords accept a move that will delay - for two years - forcing people renewing or applying for a passport to have an ID card until January 2010. But they accept that those people will have to have their details included on a new national identity register.

It emerges that tendering of contracts for the multi-billion-pound programme has been put off until at least the end of the year and the scheme is highly unlikely to be running by 2008 as planned.

Home Secretary John Reid is later forced to deny he has performed a U-turn after he drops plans for a massive single database to hold records and says the information will be spread across three existing IT systems.

2007

A high-tech "smartcard" for teenagers which was seen as a forerunner of the national ID card is abandoned by the Government.

The Youth Opportunity Card (YOC) project is scrapped by children's minister Beverley Hughes because it was going to cost twice as much as the amount budgeted and no "off-the-shelf" technology is available to operate the scheme.

2008

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith says most Britons will have a biometric identity card within nine years.

She says ID cards will be compulsory for foreign nationals from November, and within three years all new foreign applicants arriving in the UK will have to have a card.

British workers in sensitive jobs, such as airport staff, will have to have the card from 2009. Ms Smith says all new British passports will be entered on the National Identity Register - a database of the fingerprints and other details - from 2011/2012.

Identity and Passport Service (IPS) chief executive James Hall says the contracts to provide the cards contain get-out clauses if the scheme is cancelled by a future Government.

Ms Smith discloses the card's design - blue and pink, credit card-sized and carrying the royal crest and four flowers representing the nations of the UK: the rose, the thistle, the daffodil and the shamrock.

The card shows the person's name and photograph, its expiry date and details of how long a foreign national can stay and work in the country.

Date and place of birth, gender, nationality, and whether the person is entitled to benefits are shown on the back.

Biometric data, including copies of the person's fingerprints, is stored on a security chip.

Harvey Mattinson, a senior consultant at the IT security arm of GCHQ, the Government's listening station, says Prime Minister Gordon Brown's claims that ID cards will help protect against terrorism are 'absolute bunkum'.

Demonstrators in Bristol burn a giant ID card on Guy Fawkes night in protest at the introduction of compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals who come to Britain.

A Home Office survey finds support for identity cards has fallen sharply this year.

In August 60% of those questioned said they supported the scheme, but by November that figure was 55%.

Some 42% of those questioned thought ID cards would not disrupt terrorists and 39% thought they would not stop illegal immigrants.

Of those opposed to ID cards, a third said they would be an infringement of civil rights, and a quarter thought they were a waste of money.

2009

Greater Manchester is announced as the first location where British citizens can apply for a voluntary ID card from the autumn.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson says British citizens will never be forced to carry ID cards and a scheme for airport staff and pilots, at Manchester Airport and London City Airport, will be voluntary.

He says the cards will still be compulsory for foreign workers.

Explore more:
People: Beverley Hughes, Jack Straw, Richard Thomas, Gordon Brown, David Blunkett, Jacqui Smith, John Reid, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair, David Davis
Places: London, Manchester, New York, Bristol, Iraq, United Kingdom
Organisations: House of Lords, London School of Economics

[matrixcutter]

Passport details to be kept on ID register despite card U-turn
Johnson accused of pressing ahead compulsory scheme by 'back door'

Alan Travis, home affairs editor
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 30 June 2009 21.55 BST
Article history

British citizens who apply for or renew their passport will be automatically registered on the national identity card database under regulations to be approved by MPs in the next few weeks.

The decision to press ahead with the main elements of the national identity card scheme follows a review by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, of the £4.9bn project. Although Johnson said the cards would not be compulsory, critics say the passport measures amount to an attempt to introduce the system by the backdoor.

Johnson said he had halted plans to introduce compulsory identity cards for airline pilots and 30,000 other "critical workers" at Manchester and London City airports this autumn in the face of threats of legal action. Longer term plans to extend compulsory ID cards to other transport industries, such as the railways, as a condition of employment have also been scrapped.

But two batches of draft regulations to be approved by MPs tomorrow and next week are expected to include powers to make the passport a "designated document" under the national identity card scheme. This means that anyone applying for or renewing their passport from 2011 will have their details automatically added to the national identity databases.

The regulations also include powers to levy a fine of up to £1,000 on those who fail to tell the authorities of a change of address or amend other key personal details such as a change of name within three months.

Johnson said he wanted to see the introduction of identity cards accelerated for foreign nationals resident in Britain and for young "early adopters" for whom they would act as a useful proof of age. This trial is to be extended from Manchester to other parts of the north-west.

The home secretary is also looking at the possibility of waiving the £30 fee for those over 75 who want a voluntary identity card.

"There will be significant benefits to individuals from holding an identity card, which will become the most convenient, secure and affordable way of asserting identity in everyday life," said Johnson. "Identity cards will also be valid for travel throughout Europe in place of a British passport."

The home secretary emphasised his personal commitment to a voluntary scheme, saying it should be a personal choice for British citizens just as it is now to obtain a passport.

He also denied that there were any significant public spending savings to be made by cancelling the project saying: "This scheme pays for itself. If you cancel all you will get is diddly squat."

This is a reference to the self-financing nature of the project under which it is to be paid for through increased charges for passports and the £60 cost of a biometric identity card.

The only way for ID card critics to avoid being included on the national identity card databases will be not to apply or renew their passport – and so not to leave the country. As about 80% of the population currently hold a passport, the Identity and Passport Service believe that take-up of the voluntary scheme would be high.

Critics argue that at that point a political decision could be made about whether it should become compulsory for the rest of the population.

Isabella Sankey, director of policy at the human rights group Liberty, said the home secretary needed to be clear as to whether entry onto the national identity register was going to continue to be automatic when applying for a passport.

"If so, the identity scheme will be compulsory in practice.  However you spin it, big ears, four legs and a long trunk still make an elephant," she said.

"And this white elephant would be as costly to privacy and race equality as to our purses."

Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said the decision to drop the compulsory airport trials was symbolic of a government in chaos.

"They have spent millions on the scheme so far – the home secretary thinks it has been a waste and wants to scrap it, but the prime minister won't let him. So we end up with an absurd fudge instead," he said.

Guy Herbert of the No2ID campaign said the pressing ahead with making the passport a "designated document" made a nonsense of the home secretary's assertion that the scheme was not compulsory.

"It is not compulsory as long as you don't want to leave the country," he said.

He said that the announcements made by Johnson were part of the Home Office's continuing strategy to defend the scheme against cancellation by stretching it out further and further and by aligning it ever closer with the passport system.

-----

ID cards: 'If you apply for a passport you automatically go on the ID database'
Alan Travis on home secretary Alan Johnson's plan for ID card details
mp3

[matrixcutter]

All of the cash lanes will be converted to the new system, with no employees needed to man the booths.



http://www.e-470.com/

How do I pay a toll on E-470?

No cash is needed to pay a toll on E-470. A customer who does not have an EXpressToll account automatically becomes a License Plate Toll customer. A License Plate Toll bill will be sent to the registered owner of the vehicle 30 days after the first transaction. The License Plate Toll bill must be paid in full by the due date or all the transactions will become toll violations. A toll violation notice will be sent for each of those violations.


How will you find out who I am in order to bill me?

A camera takes pictures of the front and rear license plates. Vehicle ownership
information is found through the Department of Motor Vehicles in all 50 states and
some areas of Canada and Mexico.


If I am driving a rental vehicle, how do I pay my toll?

E-470 has provided EXpressToll services as requested by the various rental car
companies that conduct business in Colorado. Hertz collects tolls through
PlatePass; Avis, Budget, Alamo, and National collect tolls through Highway Toll
Administration; and Dollar and Thrifty use Rent-A-Toll. Tolls (and administrative fees
charged by PlatePass, Highway Toll Administration, and Rent-A-Toll) are added to
the customer’s rental bill. For more information on using rental vehicles on E-470,
go to: https://www.expresstoll.com/Default.aspx?pn=Rental%20Car%20Information

...

[America2]

They ain't microchipping me! If they have to drag me off to some FEMA camp to torture me, fine, but they ain't putting that thing anywhere near me!

[khalil]

Video: Electronic Mind Control (9:33 min)

This is an example of someone who was implanted with a brain chip against his will, which he said led him to do criminal acts. He had an x-ray which confirmed the implant and subsequently had it removed.

At 6:23 there is footage of Clinton apologizing for the MK Ultra Mind Control experiments.

[khalil]

Note the caption and title on the science fiction novel "The Integrated Man."

Caption: In a Future where minds are enslaved by computer chips, one man seeks revenge.

On his Wikpedia page it says the author is a game designer.

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UK ID Card Scheme Has Not Been Defeated



Déjà vu as mainstream media announces the demise of the identity card scheme for the umpteenth time

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Wednesday, July 1, 2009

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” - George Orwell.

Headlines everywhere announced yesterday that the British government has been defeated on ID cards, and that a great victory has been won for civil liberties. The problem is that we have heard this several times before and it is simply not true.

A batch of typical headlines follows:

UK dumps plans for compulsory ID cards

ID card plan climbdown is a victory for commonsense

Last rites for ID cards read by Johnson

The end of ID cards?

However, if you read further than two paragraphs into the articles you discover the truth of the matter.

“The announcement means that the only people for whom it will be compulsory to have an identity card will be foreign citizens. However, the Government is to press ahead with creating a national identity register that, from 2011-12, will include the details of everyone who applies for a passport.” reports the London Times.

Next week will also see a debate on legislation that will seek to make it an offence to withhold details of a change of address or name from the government’s register.

Indeed, the government is actually accelerating the roll-out of identity cards in the UK.

As we have constantly highlighted, the threat is not the actual ID card itself, but the biometric database.

In essence, nothing has changed, the cards will still be introduced and the identity register will go ahead as planned.

The mainstream media began to promulgate the headlines yesterday after jumping on the comments of the new Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, who said that ID cards “will never be compulsory” for British citizens.

However, Johnson also said “There will be significant benefits to individuals from holding an identity card, which will become the most convenient, secure and affordable way of asserting identity in everyday life.”

This is key. Yes, the card will not be compulsory, you will have a choice. However, as soon as cash machines, supermarket checkouts and other everyday items are linked in with the ID card database, it will become virtually impossible to live without one.

Furthermore, if you wish to hold a passport, which you need in order to travel anywhere beyond the border, you will have to be entered into the ID database.

The government never openly admitted to the compulsory nature of the ID scheme in the first instance anyway. It was only via suppressed Whitehall papers, released under the Freedom of Information Act, that the agenda for compulsory uptake was ever discovered.

The government has been caught lying and misleading on the ID issue so frequently that it is now clear that anything they say about it cannot be trusted and is usually the exact opposite of the reality of the situation.

If this current defeat of the ID scheme all feels familiar, it’s because it is, this has all happened before, several times.

In January 2006, headlines around the country announced that ID cards had been defeated in The House of Lords.

In reality, the Lords simply held off the compulsory element of the scheme by voting for an amendment requiring a separate Act of Parliament be passed to make this so.

In the months that followed, the issue went back and fourth between the House of Commons and the House of Lords and was “defeated” no less than five times.

Now here we are again, three years down the line having the same endless debate.

It is clear that ID cards and the national biometric Database are part of a long term agenda that has been mapped out into the distant future by influential powerbrokers that will always hold sway with the government in the UK, whichever party it is represented by.

As proven time and time again by history, the attempt to erode the freedom of the people by government will never be “defeated”, it will only ever be held off by permanent vigilance and action to the contrary.

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MTV Star Heidi Montag: Over My Dead Body Would I Take A Microchip

The Hills star tells The Alex Jones Show why the implantable microchip represents the “mark of the beast”



Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Star of MTV’s The Hills Heidi Montag appeared on The Alex Jones Show today with her fellow co-star husband Spencer Pratt to discuss how some nightclubs are introducing implantable identification microchips to allow customers to access VIP areas. Montag told Jones, “You would have to kill me before I get a chip.”

Montag said that as a Christian she had always been aware of “the mark of the beast” and the content of the book of Revelations but over the last month she and her husband had arrived at a “new awakening” concerning what is going on in the world after one of her music producers showed them Alex Jones’ latest documentary The Obama Deception.

“You would have to kill me before I get a chip, that would never happen,” said Montag, referring to implantable microchips.

“The fact that people are even already OK with this is sickening, I could throw up right now,” she added, “A chip? are we dogs? Not even dogs deserve chips.”

“It says in the bible that it’s the mark of the beast and that is a sign of worshipping the devil - so over my dead body would I ever get a chip in my body,” said Montag, adding, “My body belongs to Jesus Christ, to God alone, and no one will ever put anything in me, I will not worship the devil, I will not be conformed to this world, that will not happen.”


The subject of implantable microchips has vehemently left the realm of paranoia and is now a major concern as governments around the world prepare to roll out national ID cards which many fear could be replaced by mandatory implantable chips in the not too distant future.

Media interest surrounding the issue spiked in 2002 when the Jacobs family of Boca Raton, Florida, were all implanted with a Verichip containing their personal information for health and security reasons, as well as because the son Derek fantasized “about merging humans and machines”. NBC News’ Today Show even broadcast live footage of the family being surgically implanted with their chips.

In 2004, MSNBC reported that the Mexican attorney general and his staff of 160 people had “been implanted with microchips that get them access to secure areas of their headquarters.”

In August 2007, the Department of Defense announced that they were pursuing a “brain-implantable “biochip” that will measure/relay a soldier’s vitals on the battlefield,” a project said to be five years from completion.

As we have previously highlighted, the promotion of microchips not just from a safety or military aspect but in the context of popular culture is starting to gain serious momentum.

The most recent example comes from Yahoo Tech, which this week rehashed a 5 year old story about an implantable microchip being required to access the VIP area of a cool nightclub in Barcelona, as well as being used in place of a credit card to pay for drinks.

The story emphasizes how taking the chip is used to “free customers of the burdens of having to carry their purses or wallets” and “makes sense”.

Watch the interview below:

MTV's The Hills Stars"Heidi Montag & Spencer Pratt" on Alex Jones Tv 1/5:Waking Up to The NWO!! (10mins 33s)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyMA8WnRRrs

MTV's The Hills Stars"Heidi Montag & Spencer Pratt" on Alex Jones Tv 2/5:Waking Up to The NWO!! (10mins 48s)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq4ds7UhOaI

MTV's The Hills Stars"Heidi Montag & Spencer Pratt" on Alex Jones Tv 3/5:Waking Up to The NWO!! (10mins 56s)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXIcAZYdGwI

MTV's The Hills Stars"Heidi Montag & Spencer Pratt" on Alex Jones Tv 4/5:Waking Up to The NWO!! (6mins 14s)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i44o6reC7_c

MTV's The Hills Stars"Heidi Montag & Spencer Pratt" on Alex Jones Tv 5/5:Waking Up to The NWO!! (7mins 2s)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aV7R_BFnko

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Posted on Thu, Jul. 2, 2009
Bill banning forced identity-chip implants clears House
By Lauren Boyer

Inquirer Staff Writer

HARRISBURG - Invasion of privacy is an issue that really gets under State Rep. Babette Josephs' skin.
That's why the Philadelphia Democrat introduced a bill, passed unanimously last week by the House, that would ban the forced implantation of computer chips in humans.

Conjuring Orwellian images, Josephs worries the identification devices - the size of a grain of rice - could lead to a real-life Big Brother nightmare.

"I'm doing, I think, what the legislature does too little of," she said. "This is a problem on the horizon, and I want to address it before it becomes a societal disgrace."

Though the technology hasn't debuted in Pennsylvania, VeriChip, a company in Florida, received federal Food and Drug Administration clearance in 2004 to market the implanted microchips, which were tested on 200 Alzheimer's patients.

Injected into the triceps, the chips have unique 16-digit codes and GPS capabilities that allow nursing homes to find wandering patients.

"I think it's really horrible that we want to chip them like barcoded packages of meat," said Kim Sultzbaugh, a research specialist who helped Josephs write the bill.

California, North Dakota, and Wisconsin have enacted laws similar to the ban Josephs is proposing.

The technology can also be used for security, as in a widely reported case in Mexico. There, the implants were required for some government employees to enter restricted buildings.

A bar in Scotland even offers to implant patrons with chips that allow them to purchase pints without a credit card, according to news accounts.

Despite the technology's potential usefulness, Sultzbaugh said, some Christian groups liken the identification devices to the "mark of the beast," a Satanic mark described in the Book of Revelation and represented by the number 666.

Josephs said electronic ankle bracelets could keep track of someone in a less-invasive manner.

But for some "murderers, killers, and rapists," ankle bracelets won't do the trick, said State Rep. Dan Moul (R., Adams).

Moul amended Josephs' bill to allow chips to be implanted by court order. The bill also would allow the chips to be implanted in Guantanamo Bay detainees who end up in Pennsylvania.

"Terrorists could take that ankle bracelet off with a saw and strap it to a dog and let them run around," Moul said. "We need to know if these people are returning to the war to fight against America."

Josephs called Moul's changes "inflammatory" and "sensational" and hopes the Senate throws them out when it considers the measure.

Erik Arneson, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R., Delaware), said the bill was not scheduled for immediate action.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Contact staff writer Lauren Boyer at 717-236-1819.

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Court to Defendant: Stop Blasting That Man’s Mind!
By David Hambling  July 1, 2009  |  5:59 pm



Late last year, James Walbert went to court, to stop his former business associate from blasting him with mind-altering electromagnetic radiation. Walbert told the Sedgwick County, Kansas panel that Jeremiah Redford threatened him with “jolts of radiation” after a disagreement over a business deal. Later, Walbert, said, he began feeling electric shock sensations, hearing electronically generated tones, and getting popping and ringing sounds in his ears. On December 30th, the court decided in Walbert’s favor, and issued a first-of-its-kind order of protection, banning Redford from using “electronic means” to further harass Walbert. No, seriously.

I recently took part in a BBC Radio 4 program, which took a light-hearted look into the “the real Manchurian Candidate” — and examined whether there is any truth in stories of mind control. It gave me a chance to talk about exotic non-lethal weapon concepts like the so-called telepathic raygun, the system which beams sound directly into your skull, and the “voice of god” talking fireball. Most of these projects are just lab experiments, or examples of Powerpoint engineering. But in some legal, policy, and business circles, electromagnetic brain assaults are being taken seriously.

Walbert’s cause is supported by Jim Guest, a Republican member of the Missouri House of Representatives. He’s working on proposed legislation to addresses electronic harassment, including a bill against the forced implantation of RFID chips.

The U.N. is also now taking the possibility of electromagnetic terrorism against people seriously. And for the first time this year’s European Symposium on Non-lethal Weapons included a session on the social implications of non-lethal weapons, with specific reference to “privacy-invasive remote interrogation and behavioral influence applications.” Those who believe they are being targeted are getting a bit of official recognition.

For some, this opens up a new business opportunity. There are already quite a few companies out there offering “Technical Surveillance Counter Measures,” or sweeps to determine if you are the victim of electronic harassment. As well detecting the usual bugging devices, they can check if you are being covertly bombarded by microwaves which may be the cause of “headache, eye irritation, dizziness, nausea, skin rash, facial swelling, weakness, fatigue, pain in joints and/or muscles, buzzing/ringing in ears.”

Much of this trade may come from people with symptoms caused by something less exotic than high-tech military hardware. But companies will no doubt be willing to sell them expensive protection measures, anyway. And as awareness of these developing technology projects increases, we are likely to be hearing a lot more about “electronic harassment,” “gang stalking” and the like over the next few years.

And there is also likely to be what folklorists call “Ostension,” or acting out. Now that there are so many websites explaining how easy it is to harass people by zapping them with a modified microwave oven, sooner or later someone is bound to try it.

ALSO:

The Microwave Scream Inside Your Skull
Meet the MEDUSA Ray Gun
Report: Nonlethal Weapons Could Target Brain, Mimic Schizophrenia …
The Voice of God Weapon Returns
Army Yanks ‘Voice-To-Skull Devices’ Site
U.N. Investigates Electromagnetic Terrorism

Related (from Red Ice Creations):
Electromagnetic Weapons, Mind Control, New Technology & Animal Recruits
The Mind Has No Firewall

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An introduction to New Technologies (Part I)
by Patrick Redmond


Patrick Redmond graduated with a Doctorate in History from the University of London, England in 1972. He taught at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, then at  Adhadu Bello University in Kano, Nigeria before joining IBM.  He worked in IBM for 31 years before retiring. During his career at IBM he held a variety of jobs. These included; from 1992 until 2007 working at the IBM Toronto lab in technical, then in sales support. He has written two books and numerous articles. Here is a presentation he gave in Toronto on April 13, 2008.

-----

I want to thank Yvon for inviting me here to talk about new technologies. What I’m going to do is give you an introduction to three technologies that are becoming more and more important. The first is RFID chips, the second genetic engineering, and the third synthetic biology. This will give you an understanding of what is happening and where science is going.

We will start with RFID chips:

So what are they? They are Radio Frequency Identification Devices. An RFID is a microchip with an attached antenna. The microchip contains stored information which can be transmitted to a reader and then to a computer.

RFID’s can be passive, semi-passive or active. Active RFID’s have an internal power source such as a battery. This allows the tag to send signals back to the reader, so if I have a RFID on me and it has a battery, I can just send a signal to a reader wherever it is. They can receive and store data, and be read at a further distance than the passive RFID’s. The batteries can only last a short while. But the current batteries in the RFID’s can last for over a hundred years, because of their self-generating power. Ultrawideband (UWB) allows the small battery operated RFID tag to be sensed over fairly wide areas. For instance, GE Aircraft Engines in Ohio has installed five readers in the factory and it covers over 30,000 square feet so they can track everything within that area with only the five readers. That gives you an idea of the distance that can be covered by an RFID tag that might be on you or on equipment.


An RFID held by a pair of tweezers

The readers can transmit over telephone or by internet to computers and they use satellites as well. For example, Digital Angel has signed contracts with satellite providers to transmit their data for military personnel location beacons (PLBs). These beacons use the COSPAS-SARSAT satellite system. This system has some 400,000 digital beacons around the world and it’s rising to some 900,000. By the year 2009 they plan to have a GL stationary satellite system that will enable them to find the location and details of any beacon. You may sometimes see these at night; the GO stationary systemscan track any beacon. Skiers sometimes use them so that they can be identified, and sailors as well, if they become lost at sea they will be able to be tracked. Anything that has an RFID tag can be tracked by a reader or a computer.

An example of such transmission is a chip sold by Zarlink. This chip is implanted in a person; it tracks problems and if one is detected, it alerts the doctor who uses a two way RF link to interrogate and adjust the implanted device. Semi-passive RFIDs have an internal power source that let them monitor environmental conditions, such as temperature and shock, but they still require RF energy from the reader to respond.

Passive RFID’s do not have a power source but use a signal sent by the scanner to power the microchip circuit to transmit back their stored information. Passive RFID’s are getting very small. Hitachi a few years ago produced a chip (called the mu chip) that was the size of a pencil point; if you take a pencil and put it on a piece of paper you get a little dot. That’s how small they’re getting. In 2007 Hitachi came out with a chip that was even smaller, they call it RFID powder. They are just like the talcum powder you would put on a baby.

Somark Innovations in Jan 10, 2007 announced an invisible RFID ink. This can be applied to cattle, prime cuts of meat, military personnel and it can be read through hair.

I brought along a couple of the larger size chips, and this particular chip I got from Gillette fusion blades. I bought one of the blades and you can see that on one side what looks like a bar code and if you open it up you can see parts of a RFID chip on the back. This one here is from the Gap. One of my daughters went to the Gap; they put the tag directly on the clothing and the instructions just say to remove before washing and wearing. If you put it up to the light you will see the RFID chip inside it. These chips are quite small and can be put on the back of labels. They would not be noticeable in badges or ID cards; they could even be put in the eye of a person, they are that small.

In order for chips to be useful, they have to have a unique product number and because of this, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) started developing some standards. It’s called the AutoID Center. They then passed it on to the AutoID Group within the Uniform Clothes Council. It will assign codes and publish specifications, so if you have a company, government agency, or church you can contact these people and they will give you a set of numbers.

So let’s say there are three or five people in this room wearing the same white hat and each one of them has a chip on it with a different number. We could differentiate everything even if you’re all wearing the same clothes, it doesn’t really matter because everything has a unique number. MIT has the architecture of participation called EPC Global so if you go on Google and type in EPC Global and you will come up with the website they will give you instructions on how to apply and get chips. So if you want to chip yourself, your family, relatives, company or anything like that; you can do it.



It works with people who want to use this technology. One of many companies who sell the chip is called, Technic Imitations. If you have a company and you go to one of their presentations, they will give you books like this that tell you what the chips look like, how they work, the types that are sold, and what the readers look like. They will help you install chips in your company. It’s a very big business and it’s spreading very quickly.

When you use active or passive chips, active chips have advantages when you want to track items or people over longer distances. Soldiers can have active chips so they can be tracked via satellite wherever they might be in the battlefield. You can get one for your car, so you can be tracked if you are on the 407 or something.

Passive ones suffice if you are only interested in tracking over shorter distances. For example, in a sea container coming in from China, every box and every item within the box can have a chip on it. A reader can track all the items as a box passes through it. In a warehouse it is used to ensure the right shipments go to the right places. A man carrying a skid on a forklift can have the goods inside the box verified without even opening it.

They are using the chips to track inventory in order to be able to monitor what items are going where, if the right items are in the truck, etc. The passive chips are being put on devices to ensure they are valid.

There’s a lot of counterfeit drugs being produced and sold over the internet. Viagra is one of the most commonly counterfeited ones although there are many others. To ensure that people get the correct drugs they sometimes put chips on the containers so when you’re buying them you know that you are buying the correct drug.


Chipping farm animals is now required by the government

RFID’s are a great economic help to a company because they reduce theft and loss. They also streamline inventory, reduce turnaround time and handling. They’ve allowed companies to adjust production in response to inventory levels and to respond on demand. That’s why companies are interested, because of these big economic benefits and efficiency.

When you go to Wal-Mart, Best Buy, the U.S. Military and many other agencies around the world, you will see that they are all implementing RFID chips on items and increasingly on people.

The recent growth of the RFID industry has been staggering: From 1955 to 2005, cumulative sales of radio tags totaled 2.4 billion; in 2007 alone, 2.24 billion tags were sold worldwide and analysts project that by 2017 cumulative sales will top 1 trillion–generating more than $25 billion in annual revenues for the industry.

We’re starting to see chips being implemented in credit cards, debit cards and passports, driver’s licenses, health cards, and many other things. Increasingly they are being used to monitor people as well as items. RFID tags embedded into clothes and personal belongings allow people to be tracked and monitored in shopping malls, libraries, museums, sports arenas, elevators, and restrooms. American Express has them on their blue cards. They are announcing plans to place people-tracking readers in stores to track customers movements and observe their behavior. If you bought something with your credit or debit card, they will know what items you bought and if the items were chipped, they will know what you were buying. In this way they will be able to track you.

In 2006, IBM received a patent approval for an invention called, "Identification and tracking of persons using RFID-tagged items." One stated purpose was to collect information about people that could be "used to monitor the movement of the person through the store or other areas."

When somebody enters a store a reader "scans all identifiable RFID tags carried on the person," and correlates the tag information with sales records to determine the individual’s "exact identity." A device known as a "person tracking unit" which then assigns a tracking number to the shopper "to monitor the movement of the person through the store."

If I had three readers in this room, I could scan everybody in one second and I would know right away who’s here; so it would scan that quickly. The computers are getting quite sophisticated and capable of doing large numbers of scans at any given time. One company recently announced a computer that reads data transactions at 200 million/second, an incredible number.

Here’s an example of how they are being used in companies; a few oil companies have given their employees smart cards so that they know where they are at any time of the day. This ensures that people do not go where they are not authorized to go. They will see how many times an individual might go to the washroom or outside to have a cigarette; things like that. It allows continuous tracking of people, and so more and more companies are thinking it’s a novel idea.

In early 2007, the American government complained to the Canadian government that they were tracking American contractors who were visiting Canada by placing loonies ($2.00 Canadian coins) with tiny RFID transmitters in their pockets. And a CIS officer when confronted with this said: "Ah, give us a break! You might want to know where the individual was going, what meetings he’s attending, who he’s talking with and everything like that." So if they wanted they could track people with chipped loonies.

The University of Washington students, faculty and staff are being tracked as they move around the site so the details of where they’ve been, what they’re doing and with whom, will be stored in their database. One of the professors at the University was asked, "Will you check on this student?" so he checked on him and said, "Oh, he’s on the fourth floor just standing outside room 452 and now he’s moving into the classroom."

In London you can buy a monthly pass to the transit cars that have an RFID on it and if you link the bus pass to a person’s name you can track where this person is on the bus and subway system throughout London, England. Last year the police were getting four requests a month and now they are getting close to 100.

Just last week the London police announced that they were putting RFID chips on all of the 31,000 police in London. Now this may be on their ID card, they did not say if they were going to put them directly on their body, but they were getting chipped; it was published in the Daily Mail. Some of the police were complaining that they "are going to know where we are at any time, we won’t be able to go into a coffee shop and get a donut." All 31,000 police in London now have RFID’s so if they ever need to stop or control people they can direct 1,000 troops immediately to the scene.

In Southern China they’re implementing RFID readers in the city of Shenzhen to track the movement of citizens; all citizens have an ID card with a chip so they can identify who is in what part of the city at any point in time.


RFID readers in a library

The chips and National ID cards that they are trying to bring in now contain not only a number, but also a person’s work history, education, religion, ethnicity, police record and reproductive history. The United States has been trying to implement the National ID card for a few years now and there are strikes going on in different states as they try to resist this National ID that will identify everyone in the country.

Canada is adding a Real ID to the license plates and we don’t hear anything about it, its being done a lot more secretly than it is in the States where there is a lot of public debate. The increase of the use of RFID chips is going to require a increased rate of the UBF spectrum, as a result in the United States they’re going to stop using the UBF spectrum of the VHF frequency in 2009 and everything is going to go digital. You may have seen that on television in the United States.

Canada is going to do the same thing, they’ll say it still works, and instead of the antenna on your roof you’ll use a black box. The reason they’re doing this is that the UBF and VHF analog frequency are being used for the chips, so they don’t want to overload the chips with television signals, because the chips signals will now be receiving those frequencies.

A friend of mine from Quebec says his cows have a chip embedded under the skin. All farm animals have to be chipped and he says he’s no longer allowed to kill as many cows as he wants. He was given a limit of two cows that he could kill and use only for the farm. All the others had to be sold to particular companies who could control those cows and get food from them. So he could only kill two and the others he had to sell to a supermarket chain.

People are being chipped now. There’s a trend that they’re promoting in the media in terms of chipping people; they’re saying why not chip children for safety, so we can protect them, especially if they’re in the hospital then nobody could steal the newborn babies. Why don’t we chip the sick, then if someone has a heart attack and falls on the floor, we can read the signal in the chip and send someone to help them. We should chip the military so we would be able to know where the soldiers are and if they’re alive. After we could chip people on welfare so we could make sure they’re not cheating the government. Then we can chip all the criminals so that we could control them, and we’ll chip workers because a lot of them goof off at work. Then we’ll chip all the pensioners because they’re just taking money from us; and after that we’ll chip everyone else.

Some 800 hospitals in the United States are now chipping their patients. You can turn it down, but it’s available. Four hospitals in Puerto Rico have put them in the arms of the Alzheimer’s patients, and it only costs about $200 per person.

The Baja Beach Club in Barcelona gets patrons chipped. A BBC reporter went the club and got himself chipped. He said it was like getting a needle in your arm; they just rubbed it with some antiseptic and put a chip in. Because it was fairly small, he said it didn’t hurt too much and he had it inside him so whenever he ordered he would just move his arm and pay for it. The reader on the bar would read the signal and since he had his bank account information on the chip on his arm it would deduct the money from his bank account.

Nigel Gilbert of the Royal Academy of Engineering said that by 2011 you should be able to go on Google and find out where someone is at any time from chips on clothing, in cars, cell phones, and inside many people themselves.

Chips are becoming more and more sophisticated. Nature Magazine reported recently that a drug containing microchips has been developed that will release drugs at the right time and amount. They can put a chip in you and release drugs so you don’t have to take a pill every day. This particular one that they’re selling lasts for over 140 days, you just have to get chipped three times a year with this drug and it releases it every day automatically. We will probably start hearing more about things like this in the near future.

In 2006, LifeScience.com said that European researchers have developed neuro-chips, they’ve coupled together living brain cells in silicone circuits and done a lot of experimentation on rats and snails. An electrical signal from a neuron is recorded in the chips transistors, while the chip’s capitulators stimulate the neurons. They can create neuro-stimulators and use them to alleviate pain and lessen the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease.


The mu chip is only .05 ml in length

There are gastric stimulators that can treat obesity, they would make you feel hungry so you wouldn’t want to eat anymore, it would just be necessary to put a chip in your brain that would connect and send signals. In another study, neuro-chip implants were developed and are being used on violent prisoners. They were implanted with the microchip (but they didn’t know they were implanted), and when the implant was set at 160 megahertz’s all the subjects became lethargic and slept about 22 hours a day. The implants ended all aggression in violent prisoners. Another interesting application is a silicone chip implant that mimics the hippocampus, the area of the brain known for creating memories. If successful, the artificial brain prosthesis could replace its biological counterpart, enabling people who suffer from memory disorders to regain the ability to store new memories. It’s being developed by Professor Berger at the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California.

They’re working on rats and monkeys, so if applied to humans what this could do is restore your short-term memory which people lose as they get older, or it could replace your existing short-term memory with artificial short-term memory.

Applied Digital Solutions has a Verichip that is compatible with human tissue and can be used on implantable pacemakers or put defibrillators in artificial joints. It can be injected using a syringe and used as a sort of bar code in security applications. That’s seen as one of the easy ways to implement chips in people through injections. They could very easily inject it via a flu shot or a vaccine.

Verichip is working on a glucose microchip that would determine glucose levels. You wouldn’t have to draw blood to monitor glucose level. All you need is to have the doctor read your chip and your information and tell what your blood levels have been for the past month or two.

IBM has demonstrated a tiny device that measures heart rate and is able to sense when a person wearing it is in distress, after which it will call a cell phone for immediate help. The distress signal is sent wirelessly via Bluetooth.

Zarlink has developed the first swallowable camera capsule which uses Zarlink’s RF transmitter to relay real-time images from the gastrointestinal tract. Our MICS (Medical Implant Communication Services) platform is designed with in-body communication systems that will improve patient care, lower healthcare costs, and support new monitoring, diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

Currently the chip uses 100 hair-thin electrodes that sense the electro-magnetic signature of neurons firing in specific areas of the brain in, for example, the area that controls arm movement. The activity is translated into electrically charged signals and are then sent and decoded using a program, which can move either a robotic arm or a computer cursor. According to the Cyberkinetics’ website, three patients have been implanted with the BrainGate system. The company has confirmed that one patient (Matt Nagle) has a spinal cord injury, while another has advanced ALS.

This shows that human thoughts can be converted into radio waves and used by paralyzed people to create movement.

Matt Nagle sends the thoughts to a computer to decipher. He can turn his TV on or off, change channels, and alter the volume. (BBC 2005) He can also move his arms and pick up things.

In addition to real-time analysis of neuron patterns to relay movement, the Braingate array is also capable of recording electrical data for later analysis. A potential use of this feature would be for a neurologist to study seizure patterns in a patient with epilepsy.

Braingate is currently recruiting patients with a range of neuromuscular and neurodegenerative diseases, so if you want a computer chip in your brain you can just go on the website and volunteer.

What are the problems about these new technologies? Let me just give you a brief explanation. Chips are going to end privacy. There’s a website called Spychips.com operated by Katherine Albrecht; they research the use of RFID’s by different companies. They have been warning people about them because chips that have economic or health data could get that data stolen.

The New York Times in October of 2006 said that any card that doesn’t require swiping (in other words that doesn’t have a chip in it), is vulnerable to un-authorized charges and put people at risk for identity theft. You can buy scanners in electronics stores for $60 or more that can read the information on the chip.

They are finding that once implanted in people, chips can be damaging to our health. For example, the body of a rodent who was tested started rejecting some chips and started a development of cancer. Also there is a danger of viruses; you are all familiar with software viruses on your computers, imagine if you got a virus in your chip that deletes your information in your chip.

If chips can disseminate medicine then they can disseminate other things too; anything put inside a microchip can be activated by a signal. And finally, with this technology, subliminal mind control becomes possible. I went on to Google and did a search on mind control; you might find it interesting to check that yourself. I read one on patents; there are patents that exist for mind control. This is what one states: non-aural carriers, in the very low or very high audio frequency range or in the adjacent ultrasonic frequency spectrum, are amplitude or frequency modulated with the desired intelligence and propagated acoustically or vibrationally, for inducement into the brain. This is patent number 5,159,703 1992.

Another explains a device that can be placed in the auditory cortex of the brain. This device allows the following process: someone speaks into a microphone, the microphone then has the sounds coded into microwaves which are sent to the receiver in the brain and the receiver device will transform the microwaves back so that the person’s mind hears the original sounds. In other words, a person with this device in their head will hear whatever the programmers send via microwave signals. (Phillip L. Stoklin took out patent number 4,858,612 on this.)

What do things like this mean to people of faith? You know from the Apocalypse, which is the last book of the Bible, that microchips are unacceptable to God.

Chapter 13, Verses 16-17: "And he (the beast) shall make all, both little and great, rich and poor, freeman and bondmen, to have a character in their right hand, or on their foreheads. And that no man might buy or sell, but he that hath the character, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."

Chapter 16, Verse 2: "The first angel poured out his vial upon the earth, and there fell a sore and grievous wound upon men who had the character of the beast; and upon them that adored the image thereof."

Chapter 20, Verse 4: "And I saw seats; and they sat upon them; and judgment was given unto them; and the souls of them that were beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God, and who had not adored the beast nor his image, nor received his character on their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years."

If people have chips they will be tracked wherever they are. And there is a reasonable expectation that their bodies will be controlled and manipulated, as this technology is increasingly refined. Their minds will also be manipulated, they can certainly be made or induced to follow whatever people want them to follow. It’s quite conceivable that they could be made to denounce God also.

Patrick Redmond

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Ex-IBM Employee reveals TV Abandoned Analog Band to Make Room for RFID Chips
Posted by sakerfa on July 12, 2009

According to a former 31-year IBM employee, the highly-publicized, mandatory switch from analog to digital television is mainly being done to free up analog frequencies and make room for scanners used to read implantable RFID microchips and track people and products throughout the world.

So while the American people, especially those in Texas and other busy border states, have been inundated lately with news reports advising them to hurry and get their expensive passports, “enhanced driver’s licenses,” passport cards and other “chipped” or otherwise trackable identification devices that they are being forced to own, this digital television/RFID connection has been hidden, according to Patrick Redmond.

Redmond, a Canadian, held a variety of jobs at IBM before retiring, including working in the company’s Toronto lab from 1992 to 2007, then in sales support. He has given talks, written a book and produced a DVD on the aggressive, growing use of passive, semi-passive and active RFID chips (Radio Frequency Identification Devices) implanted in new clothing, in items such as Gillette Fusion blades, and in countless other products that become one’s personal belongings. These RFID chips, many of which are as small, or smaller, than the tip of a sharp pencil, also are embedded in all new U.S. passports, some medical cards, a growing number of credit and debit cards and so on. More than two billion of them were sold in 2007.

Whether active, semi-passive or passive, these “transponder chips,” as they’re sometimes called, can be accessed or activated with “readers” that can pick up the unique signal given off by each chip and glean information from it on the identity and whereabouts of the product or person, depending on design and circumstances, as Redmond explained in a little-publicized lecture in Canada last year. AFP just obtained a DVD of his talk.

Noted “Spychips” expert, author and radio host Katherine Albrecht told AMERICAN FREE PRESS that while she’s not totally sure whether there is a rock-solid RFID-DTV link, “The purpose of the switch [to digital] was to free up bandwidth. It’s a pretty wide band, so freeing that up creates a huge swath of frequencies.”

As is generally known, the active chips have an internal power source and antenna; these particular chips emit a constant signal. “This allows the tag to send signals back to the reader, so if I have a RFID chip on me and it has a battery, I can just send a signal to a reader wherever it is,” Redmond stated in the recent lecture, given to the Catholic patriot group known as the Pilgrims of Saint Michael, which also is known for advocating social credit, a dramatic monetary reform plan to end the practice of national governments bringing money into existence by borrowing it, with interest, from private central banks. The group’s publication The Michael Journal advocates having national governments create their own money interest-free. It also covers the RFID issue.

“The increased use of RFID chips is going to require the increased use of the UBF [UHF] spectrum,” Redmond said, hitting on his essential point that TV is going digital for a much different reason than the average person assumes, “They are going to stop using the [UHF] and VHF frequencies in 2009. Everything is going to go digital (in the U.S.). Canada is going to do the same thing.”

Explaining the unsettling crux of the matter, he continued: “The reason they are doing this is that the [UHF-VHF] analog frequencies are being used for the chips. They do not want to overload the chips with television signals, so the chips’ signals are going to be taking those [analog] frequencies. They plan to sell the frequencies to private companies and other groups who will use them to monitor the chips.”

Albrecht responded to that quote only by saying that it sounds plausible, since she knows some chips will indeed operate in the UHF-VHF ranges.

“Well over a million pets have been chipped,” Redmond said, adding that all 31,000 police officers in London have in some manner been chipped as well, much to the consternation of some who want that morning donut without being tracked. London also can link a RFID chip in a public transportation pass with the customer’s name. “Where is John Smith? Oh, he is on subway car 32,” Redmond said.

He added that chips for following automobile drivers – while the concept is being fought by several states in the U.S. which do not want nationalized, trackable driver’s licenses (Real ID ) – is apparently a slam dunk in Canada, where license plates have quietly been chipped. Such identification tags can contain work history, education, religion, ethnicity, reproductive history and much more.

Farm animals are increasingly being chipped; furthermore, “Some 800 hospitals in the U.S. are now chipping their patients; you can turn it down, but it’s available,” he said, adding: “Four hospitals in Puerto Rico have put them in the arms of Alzheimer’s patients, and it only costs about $200 per person.”

VeriChip, a major chip maker (the devices sometimes also are called Spychips) describes its product on its website: “About twice the length of a grain of rice, the device is typically implanted above the triceps area of an individual’s right arm. Once scanned at the proper frequency, the VeriChip responds with a unique 16 digit number which could be then linked with information about the user held on a database for identity verification, medical records access and other uses. The insertion procedure is performed under local anesthetic in a physician’s office and once inserted, is invisible to the naked eye. As an implanted device used for identification by a third party, it has generated controversy and debate.”

The circles will keep widening, Redmond predicts. Chipping children “to be able to protect them,” Redmond said, “is being promoted in the media.” After that, he believes it will come to: chip the military, chip welfare cheats, chip criminals, chip workers who are goofing off, chip pensioners – and then chip everyone else under whatever rationale is cited by government and highly-protected corporations that stand to make billions of dollars from this technology. Meanwhile, the concept is marketed by a corporate media that, far from being a watchdog of the surveillance state, is part of it, much like the media give free publicity to human vaccination programs without critical analysis on possible dangers and side effects of the vaccines.

“That’s the first time I have heard of it,” a Federal Communications Commission official claimed, when AFP asked him about the RFID-DTV issue on June 2. Preferring anonymity, he added: “I am not at all aware of that being a cause (of going to DTV).”

“Nigel Gilbert of the Royal Academy of Engineering said that by 2011 you should be able to go on Google and find out where someone is at anytime from chips on clothing, in cars, in cellphones and inside many people themselves,” Redmond also said.

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How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People
A privacy activist argues that the devices pose new security risks to those who carry them, often unwittingly
By Katherine Albrecht
From the September 2008 Scientific American Magazine

Key Concepts

- Radio-frequency identi­fication (RFID) tags are embedded in a growing number of personal items and identity documents.
- Because the tags were designed to be powerful tracking devices and they typically incorporate little security, people wearing or carrying them are vulnerable to surreptitious surveillance and profiling.
- Worldwide, legislators have done little to address those risks to citizens.

If you live in a state bordering Canada or Mexico, you may soon be given an opportunity to carry a very high tech item: a remotely readable driver’s license. Designed to identify U.S. citizens as they approach the nation’s borders, the cards are being promoted by the Department of Homeland Security as a way to save time and simplify border crossings. But if you care about your safety and privacy as much as convenience, you might want to think twice before signing up.

The new licenses come equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be read right through a wallet, pocket or purse from as far away as 30 feet. Each tag incorporates a tiny microchip encoded with a unique identification number. As the bearer approaches a border station, radio energy broadcast by a reader device is picked up by an antenna connected to the chip, causing it to emit the ID number. By the time the license holder reaches the border agent, the number has already been fed into a Homeland Security database, and the traveler’s photograph and other details are displayed on the agent’s screen.

Although such “enhanced” driver’s licenses remain voluntary in the states that offer them, privacy and security experts are concerned that those who sign up for the cards are unaware of the risk: anyone with a readily available reader device—unscrupulous marketers, government agents, stalkers, thieves and just plain snoops—can also access the data on the licenses to remotely track people without their knowledge or consent. What is more, once the tag’s ID number is associated with an individual’s identity—for example, when the person carrying the license makes a credit-card transaction—the radio tag becomes a proxy for that individual. And the driver’s licenses are just the latest addition to a growing array of “tagged” items that consumers might be wearing or carrying around, such as transit and toll passes, office key cards, school IDs, “contactless” credit cards, clothing, phones and even groceries.

RFID tags have been likened to barcodes that broadcast their information, and the comparison is apt in the sense that the tiny devices have been used mainly for identifying parts and inventory, including cattle, as they make their way through supply chains. Instead of having to scan every individual item’s Universal Product Code (UPC), a warehouse worker can register the contents of an entire pallet of, say, paper towels by scanning the unique serial number encoded in the attached RFID tag. That number is associated in a central database with a detailed list of the pallet’s contents. But people are not paper products. During the past decade a shift toward embedding chips in individual consumer goods and, now, official identity documents has created a new set of privacy and security problems precisely because RFID is such a powerful tracking technology. Very little security is built into the tags themselves, and existing laws offer people scant protection from being surreptitiously tracked and profiled while living an increasingly tagged life.

Beyond Barcodes

The first radio tags identified military aircraft as friend or foe during World War II, but it was not until the late 1980s that similar tags became the basis of electronic toll-collection systems, such as E-ZPass along the East Coast. And in 1999 corporations began considering the tags’ potential for tracking millions of individual objects. In that year Procter & Gamble and Gillette (which have since merged to become the world’s largest consumer-product manufacturing company) formed a consortium with Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers, called the Auto-ID Center, to develop RFID tags that would be small, efficient and cheap enough to eventually replace the UPC barcode on everyday consumer products.

By 2003 the group had developed a working version of the technology and attracted in­­vest­ment from more than 100 companies and government agencies. The tags’ promoters promised the tiny chips would revolutionize inventory management and counterfeiting prevention [see “RFID: A Key to Automating Everything,” by Roy Want; Scientific American, January 2004].

To kick-start government adoption of the technology, the General Services Administration (GSA), a federal bureau that manages purchasing for other government institutions, issued a memo in 2004 urging the heads of all federal agencies “to consider action that can be taken to advance the [RFID] industry.” Suddenly, virtually every agency, from the Social Security Administration to the Food and Drug Administration, began announcing RFID trials.

During the same period, similar initiatives were under way around the world. In 2003 the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a United Nations agency that sets global passport standards, endorsed the use of RFID tags in passports. ICAO now calls for their use in all scannable “e-passports.” Today dozens of countries, including the U.S., issue e-passports with RFID tags embedded in their covers.

Since their debut, the new passports have been controversial on both privacy and security grounds. In a 2006 report one ICAO official promised that encryption measures would provide a “level of protection [that] should reassure the most anxious passport holder that his personal data cannot be read without his knowledge.”

Security experts quickly proved otherwise. In 2007 British security consultant Adam Laurie cracked the encryption code on a U.K. passport and “skimmed,” or remotely read, its personal information—while it was still sealed in its mailing envelope. Around the same time, German security consultant Lukas Grunwald copied the data from a German passport’s embedded chip and encoded it into a different RFID tag to create a forged document that could fool an electronic passport reader. Investigators at Charles University in Prague, finding similar vulnerabilities in Czech e-passports, wrote that it was “a bit surprising to meet an implementation that actually encourages rather than eliminates [security] attacks.”

Yet these demonstrated security problems have not slowed the adoption of RFID. On the contrary, the technology is being deployed for domestic ID cards around the world. Malaysia has issued some 25 million contactless national identity cards. Qatar is issuing one that stores the cardholder’s fingerprint in addition to personal information. And in what industry observers are calling the single largest RFID project in the world, the Chinese government is spending $6 billion to roll out RFID-based national
IDs to nearly one billion citizens and residents.

There is an important difference, however, between other nations’ RFID-based ID cards and Homeland Security’s new driver’s licenses. Most countries’ contactless national IDs and e-passports have adopted an RFID tag that meets an industry standard known as ISO 14443, which was developed specifically for identification and payment cards and has a degree of security and privacy protection built in. In contrast, U.S. border cards use an RFID standard known as EPCglobal Gen 2, a technology that was designed to track products in warehouses, where the goal is not security but maximum ease of readability.

Whereas the ISO 14443 standard includes rudimentary encryption and requires tags to be close to a scanner to be read (a distance measured in inches rather than feet), Gen 2 tags typically have no encryption and only minimal data safeguards. To skim the data from an encrypted ISO 14443 chip, you have to crack the encryption code, but no special skills are required to skim a Gen 2 tag; all you need is any Gen 2 reader. Such readers can be purchased readily and are in common use in warehouses worldwide. A hacker or crim­inal armed with one could skim a border card through a purse, across a room, even through a wall.

As of this past April, more than 35,000 Washington State motorists had signed up for en­­hanced driver’s licenses, and other border states, including Arizona, Michigan and Vermont, have agreed to participate in the program. New York State will begin making the new licenses available to its residents after Labor Day.

But the possibility that the security of such cards could be compromised is just one reason for concern. Even if tighter data-protection measures could someday prevent unauthorized access to RFID-card data, many privacy advocates worry that remotely readable identity documents could be abused by governments that wish to tightly monitor and control their citizens.

China’s national ID cards, for instance, are encoded with what most people would consider a shocking amount of personal information, including health and reproductive history, employment status, religion, ethnicity and even the name and phone number of each cardholder’s landlord. More ominous still, the cards are part of a larger project to blanket Chinese cities with state-of-the-art surveillance technologies. Michael Lin, a vice president for China Public Security Technology, a private company providing the RFID cards for the program, unflinchingly described them to the New York Times as “a way for the government to control the population in the future.” And even if other governments do not take advantage of the surveillance potential inherent in the new ID cards, ample evidence suggests that data-hungry corporations will.

Living a Tagged Life

If the idea that corporations might want to use RFID tags to spy on individuals sounds far-fetched, it is worth considering an IBM patent filed in 2001 and granted in 2006. The patent describes exactly how the cards can be used for tracking and profiling even if access to official databases is unavailable or strictly limited. Entitled “Identification and Tracking of Persons Using RFID-Tagged Items in Store Environments,” it chillingly details RFID’s potential for surveillance in a world where networked RFID readers called “person tracking units” would be incorporated virtually everywhere people go—in “shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, restrooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, [and] mu­­se­­ums”—to closely monitor people’s movements.

According to the patent, here is how it would work in a retail environment: an “RFID tag scanner located [in the desired tracking location]... scans the RFID tags on [a] person.... As that person moves around the store, different RFID tag scanners located throughout the store can pick up radio signals from the RFID tags carried on that person and the movement of that person is tracked based on these detections.... The person tracking unit may keep records of different locations where the person has visited, as well as the visitation times.”

The fact that no personal data are stored in the RFID tag does not present a problem, IBM explains, because “the personal information will be obtained when the person uses his or her credit card, bank card, shopper card or the like.” The link between the unique RFID number of the tag and a person’s identity needs to be made only once for the card to serve as a proxy for the person thereafter. Although IBM envisioned tracking people via miniature tags in consumer goods, with today’s RFID border cards there is no need to wait for such individual product tags to become widespread. Washington’s new driver’s licenses would be ideally suited to the in-store tracking application, because they can already be read by Gen 2 inventory scanners in use today at stores such as Wal-Mart, Dillard’s and American Apparel.

A tracking infrastructure will become increasingly fruitful to marketers as more people begin carrying, and even wearing, RFID-tagged items. At present, tens of millions of contactless credit and ATM cards containing RFID tags are in circulation, along with millions of employee access badges. RFID-based public-transit passes, widely used in Europe and Japan, are also coming to U.S. cities. IBM’s person tracking unit is still only a patent, but an English amusement park called Alton Towers provides a living illustration of RFID’s tracking potential. On entering the park, each visitor is offered an RFID wristband encoded with a unique ID number. As people enjoy the attractions, a network of RFID readers placed strategically throughout the park detects each wristband as it comes within range and triggers nearby video cameras. Candid footage of each individual is stored in a file labeled with the wristband ID number, then made available to the customer on a keepsake DVD at the end of the day.

Protecting the Public

If RFID tags can enable an amusement park to capture detailed, personalized videos of thousands of people a day, imagine what a determined government could do—not to mention marketers or criminals. That is why my colleagues in the privacy community and I have so firmly opposed the use of RFID in government-issued identity documents or individual consumer items. As far back as 2003, my organization, CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering)—along with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and 40 other leading privacy and civil liberties advocates and organizations—recognized this threat and issued a position paper that condemned the tracking of human beings with RFID as inappropriate.

In response to these concerns, dozens of U.S. states have introduced RFID consumer-protection bills—which have all been either killed or gutted by heavy opposition from lobbyists for the RFID industry. When the New Hampshire Senate voted on a bill that would have imposed tough regulations on RFID in 2006, a last-minute floor amendment replaced it with a two-year study instead. (I was appointed by the governor to serve on the resulting commission.) That same year a California bill that would have prohibited the use of RFID in government-issued documents passed both houses of the legislature, only to be vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

On the federal level, no high-profile consumer-protection bills related to RFID have been passed. Instead, in 2005, the Senate Republican High Tech Task Force praised RFID applications as “exciting new technologies” with “tremendous promise for our economy” and vowed to protect RFID from regulation or legislation.

In the European Union, regulators are at least examining the situation. The European Commission—the executive arm of the E.U.—has acknowledged the potential for serious privacy problems with RFID and opened a public comment period earlier this year. As of July, when this issue went to press, recommendations stemming from the public comments were set to be released later in the summer, but expectations for any consumer-privacy regulations were low. In a March 2007 speech, E.U. commissioner for information society and media Viviane Reding announced that the commission would not regulate RFID but instead would allow businesses to regulate themselves. “I am here to tell you that on RFIDs, there is not going to be a regulation,” she said. “My view is that we should underregulate rather than overregulate so that this sector can take off.”

Unfortunately, industry self-regulation has little force when it comes to protecting the public from RFID risks. EPCglobal, the industry body that now sets technical standards for RFID tags, also produced a set of guidelines for the use of the chips in retail. The organization’s recommendations require, among other things, notice to consumers whenever products contain RFID tags—for instance, in the form of a recognizable RFID logo. Yet when Checkpoint Systems, a member company of EPCglobal, designed RFID tags to be hidden in the soles of shoes—in clear violation of the organization’s own provisions—Mike Meranda, then president of EPCglobal, told me that since the guidelines were voluntary, there was nothing he or his organization could do about it.

The Washington State Department of Licensing reassures citizens that their personal information is safe because the RFID tag in an enhanced driver’s license “doesn’t have a power source” and “doesn’t contain any personal identifying inform­ation”—even though those facts have no bearing on whether the card can be used for tracking. For some people, a false sense of assurance provided by such official mollifications could be dangerous. The National Network to End Domestic Violence, a group that vocally opposes the use of RFID in identity documents and consumer products, has submitted legislative testimony describing how abusers could use the technology to stalk and monitor their victims.

Meanwhile the RFID train is barreling forward. Gigi Zenk, a spokesperson at Washington’s licensing agency, recently confirmed that there are 10,000 enhanced licenses “on the street now—that people are actually carrying.” That’s a lot of potential for abuse, and it will only grow. The state recently mustered a halfhearted response, passing a law that designates the unauthorized reading of a tag “for the purpose of fraud, identity theft, or for any other illegal purpose” as a class C felony, subject to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Nowhere in the law does it say, however, that scanning for other purposes such as marketing—or perhaps “to control the population”—is prohibited. We ignore these risks at our peril.

Note: This article was originally published with the title, "RFID Tag--You're It".

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katherine Albrecht holds a doctorate in education from Harvard University and is director of CASPIAN, a 15,000-member consumer privacy organization opposing retail surveillance. Since 2003 she has worked to expose and prevent unethical uses of RFID in products and in people. She regularly testifies before legislators and delivered a keynote address at a workshop on RFID and privacy held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has also co-authored two books describing how corporate and governmental uses of RFID could threaten individual privacy and security.

More to Explore

How RFID Tags Work
Types of RFID Tags
RFID Tags in Everyday Life

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European Commission RFID policy and information
The RFID Ecosystem Project at the University of Washington
Radio-frequency Identification (RFID): Addressing Concerns over Information Collection and Usage.
Katherine Albrecht's "Spychips" web site
SANCTIFYING THE COSMOS
How far are we from realizing practical benefits from nanotechnology?
GM Plugs Its Chevy Volt Hybrid, but Will It Be Road-Ready In Time?
RFID--A Key to Automating Everything

[matrixcutter]

Chips in official IDs raise privacy fears
By TODD LEWAN
The Associated Press
Sunday, July 12, 2009; 6:10 AM


In this April 10, 2009. photo, Chris Paget, a self-described "ethical hacker," sits in the back of his car with electronic equipment seeking information from imbedded radio frequency identification, or RFID chips as people pass him along the Embarcadero in San Francisco.




In the above April 10, 2009 photos, Chris Paget, a self-described "ethical' hacker," sits with his scanning equipment along the Embarcadero in San Francisco seeking information from radio frequency identification, or RFID, chips as people pass by him. In the background is the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.


In this April 9, 2009 photo, electronic readers and displays for NEXUS identification cards are lined-up at a border crossing from Canada into the United States at Blaine, Wash. The NEXUS card, with an imbedded radio frequency identification, or RFID, chip that can be read up to 20 feet away, allows pre-screened travelers expedited processing though dedicated traffic lanes between the U.S. and Canada, as well as airports and marine locations.


In this April 9, 2009 photo, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer Victoria Stephens speaks with a couple using NEXUS identification cards at a border crossing from Canada into the United States at Blaine, Wash. The NEXUS card, with an imbedded radio frequency identification, or RFID, chip that can be read up to 20 feet away, allows pre-screened travelers expedited processing though dedicated traffic lanes between the U.S. and Canada, as well as airports and marine locations.


In this April 9, 2009 photo, a driver holds up a NEXUS identification card at a border crossing from Canada into the United States in Blaine, Wash. The NEXUS card, with an imbedded radio frequency identification, or RFID, chip that can be read up to 20 feet away, allows pre-screened travelers expedited processing though dedicated traffic lanes between the U.S. and Canada, as well as airports and marine locations.


In this May 28, 2009 photo, a new "enhanced" United States passport lies, at left, beside an expired pierced passport at an Immigration & Family Law business downtown in Los Angeles. On June 1, it became mandatory for Americans entering the United States by land or sea from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and the Caribbean to present identity documents embedded with RFID tags, though conventional passports remain valid until they expire. The new passport contains a radio frequency identification chip, indicated by the small graphic below the words "United States of America."

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Climbing into his Volvo, outfitted with a Matrics antenna and a Motorola reader he'd bought on eBay for $190, Chris Paget cruised the streets of San Francisco with this objective: To read the identity cards of strangers, wirelessly, without ever leaving his car.

It took him 20 minutes to strike hacker's gold.

Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, his scanner downloaded to his laptop the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic U.S. passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he'd "skimmed" four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet.

Increasingly, government officials are promoting the chipping of identity documents as a 21st century application of technology that will help speed border crossings, safeguard credentials against counterfeiters, and keep terrorists from sneaking into the country.

But Paget's February experiment demonstrated something privacy advocates had feared for years: That RFID, coupled with other technologies, could make people trackable without their knowledge.

He filmed his heist, and soon his video went viral on the Web, intensifying a debate over a push by government, federal and state, to put tracking technologies in identity documents and over their potential to erode privacy.

Putting a traceable RFID in every pocket has the potential to make everybody a blip on someone's radar screen, critics say, and to redefine Orwellian government snooping for the digital age.

"Little Brother," some are already calling it - even though elements of the global surveillance web they warn against exist only on drawing boards, neither available nor approved for use.

But with advances in tracking technologies coming at an ever-faster rate, critics say, it won't be long before governments could be able to identify and track anyone in real time, 24-7, from a cafe in Paris to the shores of California.

On June 1, it became mandatory for Americans entering the United States by land or sea from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and the Caribbean to present identity documents embedded with RFID tags, though conventional passports remain valid until they expire.

Among new options are the chipped "e-passport," and the new, electronic PASS card - credit-card sized, with the bearer's digital photograph and a chip that can be scanned through a pocket, backpack or purse from 30 feet.

Alternatively, travelers can use "enhanced" driver's licenses embedded with RFID tags now being issued in some border states: Washington, Vermont, Michigan and New York. Texas and Arizona have entered into agreements with the federal government to offer chipped licenses, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has recommended expansion to non-border states. Kansas and Florida officials have received DHS briefings on the licenses, agency records show.

The purpose of using RFID is not to identify people, says Mary Ellen Callahan, the chief privacy officer at Homeland Security, but "to verify that the identification document holds valid information about you."

An RFID document that doubles as a U.S. travel credential "only makes it easier to pull the right record fast enough, to make sure that the border flows, and is operational" - even though a 2005 Government Accountability Office report found that government RFID readers often failed to detect travelers' tags.

Critics warn that RFID-tagged identities will enable identity thieves and other criminals to commit "contactless" crimes against victims who won't immediately know they've been violated.

Neville Pattinson, vice president for government affairs at Gemalto, Inc., a major supplier of microchipped cards, is no RFID basher. He's a board member of the Smart Card Alliance, an RFID industry group, and is serving on the Department of Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee.

In a 2007 article published by a newsletter for privacy professionals, Pattinson called the chipped cards vulnerable "to attacks from hackers, identity thieves and possibly even terrorists."

RFID, he wrote, has a fundamental flaw: Each chip is built to faithfully transmit its unique identifier "in the clear, exposing the tag number to interception during the wireless communication."

Once a tag number is intercepted, "it is relatively easy to directly associate it with an individual," he says. "If this is done, then it is possible to make an entire set of movements posing as somebody else without that person's knowledge."

Echoing these concerns were the AeA - the lobbying association for technology firms - the Smart Card Alliance, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Business Travel Coalition, and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been promoting broad use of RFID even though its own advisory committee on data integrity and privacy issued caveats. In its 2006 draft report, the committee concluded that RFID "increases risks to personal privacy and security, with no commensurate benefit for performance or national security," and recommended that "RFID be disfavored for identifying and tracking human beings."

For now, chipped PASS cards and enhanced driver's licenses are not yet widely deployed in the United States. To date, roughly 192,000 EDLs have been issued in Washington, Vermont, Michigan and New York.

But as more Americans carry them "you can bet that long-range tracking of people on a large scale will rise exponentially," says Paget, a self-described "ethical hacker" who works as an Internet security consultant.

But Gigi Zenk, a spokeswoman for the Washington state Department of Licensing, says Americans "aren't that concerned about the RFID" in a time when "tracking an individual is much easier through a cell phone."

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks - and the finding that some terrorists entered the United States using phony passports - the State Department proposed mandating that Americans and foreign visitors carry "enhanced" passport booklets, with microchips embedded in the covers.

In February 2005, when the State Department asked for public comment, it got an outcry: Of the 2,335 comments received, 98.5 percent were negative, with 86 percent expressing security or privacy concerns, the department reported in an October 2005 notice in the Federal Register.

Identity theft and "fears that the U.S. Government or other governments would use the chip to track and censor, intimidate or otherwise control or harm them" were of "grave concern," it noted. Many Americans worried "that the information could be read at distances in excess of 10 feet."

Those citizens, it turns out, had cause.

According to department records obtained by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, under a Freedom of Information Act request and reviewed by the AP, discussion about security concerns with the e-passport occurred as early as January 2003 but tests weren't ordered until the department began receiving public criticism two years later.

When the AP asked when testing was initiated, the State Department said only that "a battery of durability and electromagnetic tests were performed" by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, along with tests "to measure the ability of data on electronic passports to be surreptitiously skimmed or for communications with the chip reader to be eavesdropped," testing which "led to additional privacy controls being placed on U.S. electronic passports ... "

In 2005, the department incorporated metallic fibers into the e-passport's front cover, to reduce the read range, and added encryptions and a feature that required inspectors to optically scan the e-passport first for the chip to communicate wirelessly.

But what of concerns about the e-passport's read range?

In its October 2005 Federal Register notice, the State Department reassured Americans that the e-passport's chip would emit radio waves only within a 4-inch radius, making it tougher to hack.

But in May 2006, at the University of Tel Aviv, researchers directly skimmed an encrypted tag from several feet away. At the University of Cambridge in Britain, a student intercepted a transmission between an e-passport and a legitimate reader from 160 feet.

The State Department, according to its own records obtained under FOIA, was aware of the problem months before its Federal Register notice and more than a year before the e-passport was rolled out in August 2006.

"Do not claim that these chips can only be read at a distance of 10 cm (4 inches)," Frank Moss, deputy assistant Secretary of State for passport services, wrote in an April 22, 2005, e-mail to Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance. "That really has been proven to be wrong."

The chips could be skimmed from a yard away, he added - all a hacker would need to read e-passport numbers, say, in an elevator.

In February 2006, an encrypted Dutch e-passport was hacked on national television, and later, British e-passports were hacked. The State Department countered that European e-passports weren't as safe as their American counterparts because they lacked safety features such as the anti-skimming cover. Recent studies have shown, however, that more powerful readers can penetrate that metal sheathing.

The RFIDs in enhanced driver's licenses and PASS cards contain a silicon computer chip attached to a wire antenna, which transmits a unique identifier via radio waves when "awakened" by an electromagnetic reader.

The technology they use is designed to track products through the supply chain. These chips, known as EPCglobal Gen 2, are intended to release their data to any inquiring Gen 2 reader within a 30-foot radius.

The government says remotely readable ID cards transmit only RFID numbers, which correspond to records stored in secure government databases. Even if a hacker were to copy an RFID number onto a blank tag and place it into a counterfeit ID, officials say, the forger's face still wouldn't match the true cardholder's photo in the database.

Still, computer experts say government databases can be hacked. Others worry about a day when hackers might deploy readers at "chokepoints," such as checkout lines, skim RFID numbers from people's driver's licenses, then pair those numbers to personal data skimmed from chipped credit cards (though credit cards are harder to skim). They imagine stalkers skimming RFID tags to track their targets, and fear government agents compiling chip numbers at peace rallies, mosques or gun shows, simply by strolling through a crowd with a reader.

Others worry more about the linking of chips with other identification methods, including biometric technologies, such as facial recognition.

Should biometrics be coupled with RFID, "governments will have, for the first time in history, the means to identify, monitor and track citizens anywhere in the world in real time," says Mark Lerner, spokesman for the Constitutional Alliance, a network of nonprofit groups, lawmakers and citizens opposed to remotely readable identity and travel documents.

The International Civil Aviation Organization, the U.N. agency that sets global standards for passports, now calls for facial recognition in all e-passports.

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Here are a couple more all-pro-and-no-con propaganda pieces that were posted in General:



'Please Rocco, come home'

After the Villacis' beagle Rocco strayed from their yard in Queens, N.Y., in 2003, the whole family was devastated -- but no one took it harder than little Natalie. The 5-year-old cried for extended periods, and she never parted with the dog's favorite toy, a stuffed cat.

And then in 2008, more than five years after he had disappeared, he turned up 850 miles away at an animal-control office in Georgia. He was reunited with his family because of his microchip. "When my mom told me they found Rocco, I cried hysterically -- just like I did when they told me he was lost," Natalie told the New York Post. "Every time I would see a dog on the street, I would say to my mom, 'Maybe Rocco will come back.' She would say that he probably isn't going to come back. I would say, 'I know, but maybe he will.'...At night, I would wish, 'Please Rocco, come home.' And now that wish came true."

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Thursday, July 16, 2009
RFID Makes Running Marathons More Fun

When I ran my first marathon in 1983, I remember carefully filling out all the information on my race number so that when I crossed the finish line the race organizers could actually figure out my time and place.  I can’t remember, but I don’t think any computers were involved; I believe it was entirely a manual process.  Maybe there was an Apple II and a copy of Visicalc or dBase II somewhere behind the scenes, but I doubt it.



This is a photo of 25,000 people running the inaugural Seattle Rock ‘N’ Roll Marathon last weekend.  Each of them is wearing a tiny ChronoTrack D-tag which contains an RFID chip made by Impinj.  (Impinge eh?  How very apt.)

Now, if you’ve ever run a marathon (or any organized road race), you know that the timing systems have made huge progress in the past decade.  Runners in big races now talk about “chip time” which is the actual time you ran the race; the time it takes from the point you crossed the starting line to the point you crossed the finish line.  No more adjusting your “time” for the 2 minutes and 33 seconds it takes to get across the starting line (or – if you are a back of the pack starter like me, the 10+ minutes it occasionally takes.)

However, if you are like me, you hate the f**king two ounces of plastic you have to tie to your shoe, or wrap around your ankle, or weave into your shoelaces.  It’s uncomfortable, unbalanced (two ounces on your right ankle over 26.2 miles is actually noticeable), and super frustrating when it doesn’t work. Then, when you get to the finish line, you have to get it off your shoe (usually with help from a race helper person) and give it back!  Blech.

The RFID chip approach completely changes the whole dynamic.  It’s light weight (imperceptible), trivial to attach to your shoe, and you can keep it because it’s extremely inexpensive.  Plus, I find it awesomely cool to wear an RFID tag while I’m running (and use another product from a company in which I’m an investor in a way I hadn’t expected.)  Fun!

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Dehumanisation + robots:

Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies
Fox News
Wednesday, July 15, 2009


EATR robots roam a barren landscape as an unmanned drone flies overhead in an artist's rendering.

It could be a combination of 19th-century mechanics, 21st-century technology — and a 20th-century horror movie.

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR" — "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.

That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone.

EATR will be powered by the Waste Heat Engine developed by Cyclone Power Technology of Pompano Beach, Fla., which uses an "external combustion chamber" burning up fuel to heat up water in a closed loop, generating electricity.

The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.

Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.

In press materials, Robotic Technology presents EATR as an essentially benign artificial creature that fills its belly through "foraging," despite the obvious military purpose.

• Click here for a brief description of EATR at the Robotic Technology Web site.

• Click here for a much longer overview of the project in PDF format.

Related Stories

Military Developing Half-Robot, Half-Insect 'Cybug' Spies
Researchers Design Tiny Robotic Bat
NASA's Shape-Shifting Robot Is 'Real' Transformer

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Alan Watt discussed this article in the following RBN show:

July 15, 2009
Alan Watt "Cutting Through The Matrix" on RBN:
Plan is Calling for More Shock-and-Awe-ing:
"We've Grown Accustomed to Shock and Awe,
No Horror Response, Wide Mouth, Slack Jaw,
Those Crying 'Terror, Famine, Warming, Plague'
Should All be Tried in the Court of Hague,
Politicians, Big Media, Big Pharma too,
And Many More in the Psychopath Zoo,
All Those Who've Trained Public to be Unconcerned,
Bombarded with Trivia, No Means to Discern
'Tween Events Unfolding vs. Tactical Plan,
Deciding the Future of Child, Woman, Man,
Conspiracy Theory? No, Not Far to Look,
Confirmation in Many a Dusty Old Book,
As They Lead the World Toward the Abattoir,
Leaving Their Prints, Biographical Memoir"
***Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - July 15, 2009 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)
***LISTEN / DOWNLOAD

Topics of show covered in following links:
"Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies" (foxnews.com) - July 15, 2009.
"EATR: ENERGETICALLY AUTONOMOUS TACTICAL ROBOT" (robotictechnologyinc.com).
"Israeli soldiers: 'No clear red lines' in Gaza war" by Steve Weizman, AP (google.com) - July 15, 2009.
"Government backs Blair as President of Europe" by Tim Shipman (dailymail.co.uk) - July 16, 2009.

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College Plans Virtual Graduation for Online Students
By Paul Wagenseil
FOX News
Monday, June 08, 2009


Bryant & Stratton College - Ceremonies get under way in the Second Life graduation.

Many colleges and universities offer online courses. But only one's having an online graduation.

Bryant & Stratton College, a for-profit institution with campuses in four states, plus an online division, plans to host a graduation ceremony June 10 in Second Life, the online virtual world.

Fittingly, the commencement address will be delivered by Second Life founder Philip Rosedale.

"The Bryant & Stratton ceremony will be the first time a graduation will be fully hosted on Second Life, including the procession, the commencement speaker and the conferring of degrees to students who are even draped in their digital caps and gowns," says the college's Web site.

• Click here for more about the Bryant & Stratton virtual graduation.

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Some transhumanist propaganda:

Mind Uploading and Mind Children
Written By: Extropia DaSilva
Date Published: July 1, 2009 | View more articles in: Virtual Reality



There are two major questions surrounding the concept of mind uploading. There is the question of feasibility: Can we build a model of a brain complete enough to allow a conscious mind to emerge? The other question is concerned with identity. Some people argue that, if a copy of a conscious mind is identical by all measures (ignoring the fact that one is biological and the other is neuromorphic software/hardware) it should be thought of as a continuation of the mind that was mapped and uploaded. Others argue that a copy cannot be considered the same as the original, so the newly awakened consciousness must be another person.

Various attempts have been made to imagine the benefits of mind uploading. Assuming continuation of the mind, these benefits include indefinite lifespans and upgrading the mind. When your current brain no longer works well enough or not at all, you transfer your conscious mind to another (perhaps better) artificial brain. None of these benefits are tempting to those who see uploads as different people. In The Spike, Damien Broderick declared “copies are not you” and asked, “Would you be prepared to die (sacrifice your current embodiment) in order that an exact copy of yourself be reconstructed elsewhere, or on a different substrate?” He goes on to argue that this is not a procedure he would be willing to undertake. Let’s assume Broderick is right and a copy is indeed “not you.” Does it then follow that mind uploading offers no benefits?

WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?

Throughout Broderick’s argument, there is the impression that the uploaded consciousness would be a stranger to whom one would have few ties. But I think the copy would have the same status as Hans Moravec’s 4th generation universal robots. Moravec said, “I consider these future machines to be our progeny, ‘mind children’ built in our image and likeness.” I think “mind children” is an appropriate term for uploads. After all, when you have offspring some of your genes are duplicated. Each person is the result of two channels of heredity: genetic data encoded in DNA, and culture. Vernor Vinge has suggested humans can be defined as the species that learned to outsource aspects of cognition. This began with the evolution of complex language and the ability to communicate thoughts and intentions to other minds. It continued with the emergence of writing and the preservation of memories in external systems, and now includes technologies that are gradually assuming functions once thought to be exclusively biological. Mind uploading would mark the point at which culture becomes completely independent of biology — when all (not just aspects of) a person’s cognition could be duplicated. Can it really be the case that people would treat their upload as a stranger? I would imagine there would actually be a connection that is closer than that which can exist between identical twins.

It would also offer a solution to Terry Grossman’s complaint that death wastes a colossal amount of knowledge. If you assume each person’s life experience amounts to one book, the 52 million deaths that occur annually are equivalent to burning the Library of Congress three times every year. We do attempt to preserve knowledge and pass it on to future generations, but it takes decades for biological children to reach maturity. However, a “mind child” uploaded from an adult brain would, from day one, possess a lifetime’s worth of knowledge. As the problems society faces grows more complex, surely it makes sense to have offspring that can contribute to problem-solving from day one?

FROM “DIGITAL INTERMEDIARIES” TO “DIGITAL TWINS”

Must we wait until mind uploading is realized before we get to know our “mind children,” those future progeny who possess our memories and yet grow into different people? Perhaps not. Today, some people use online worlds like Second Life to create and develop “digital people.” This involves emphasizing the roleplaying possibilities of shared online spaces. So, whereas Emily Brontë used the medium of literature to create and develop the character of Heathcliff, now some people create and develop characters who exist exclusively within online spaces. A digital person is best not thought of as comparable to the relationship between “George Elliot” and “Mary Evans” (the former being a pseudonym of the latter) but more like “George Elliot” and “Silas Marner” (the latter being a character created by the former).

If you try to argue 'an upload of your mind would not be you' with a digital person (which, remember, is a term used to describe a character roleplayed in virtual worlds), you are missing the point. The scanning procedure would not be performed on the brain of the digital person. After all, it does not really have a brain of its own, any more than a literary or movie character does. No, the brain being scanned would belong to the person who actually does the roleplaying. Subjectively, there may already seem to be a degree of separation. He or she may imagine the character to be an individual in its own right. Once the upload is complete and that digital person truly develops independent of the mind that thought it up, perhaps that would not trigger the psychological issues that might arise if one expected the upload to be a continuation of oneself.

A related question is often asked: To what extent is a digital person separate from the person who is roleplaying them? The question is often asked. Many consider it impossible to create and sustain a personality that is substantially different from the RL persona. Others argue that current virtual reality is too crude to enable deep immersion into an alternate identity. The first argument may be true, but it hardly rules out the possibility of developing a digital person that is somewhat different from the RL self. As for the second argument, the crudeness of current VR may be an advantage. It enables those who want to play around with alternate identities or character creation, but does not yet raise the kind of existential questions that plagued people in Greg Egan’s Permutation City or the Matrix movies. As online worlds grow in sophistication, it should enable increasingly complex explorations of alternate identities. The end result may seem very strange to us, but perhaps less so to the people who get to use them, especially if they emerged from many small steps from the previous generation of online worlds.



Developments in AI may also allow avatars to become increasingly autonomous. With eye-tracking software, a user could look at a point in the virtual space, and their avatar would head toward it. This might seem like nothing more than a convenient tool, but if an avatar can infer objects of interest from the direction of the user’s gaze, that would represent a basic step toward developing theory of mind.

This is something that interests search engine providers. Yahoo’s Usama Fayyad commented, “With more knowledge about where you are, what you are like and what you are doing at the moment…the better we will be able to deliver relevant information when people need it.” This would suggest mind uploading might benefit from progress in search software. After all, to develop as complete a model of a person’s state of mind as possible, eventually you must build something close to a copy of that mind. At Google, Peter Norvig sees us moving away from typing words into a search engine. Instead, “people will discuss their needs with a digital intermediary…the result will not be a list of links, but an annotated report (or a simple conversation) that synthesizes the important points.”

A “digital intermediary” sounds less like a tool and more like a person that collaborates with users, helping to gather and organize information. As storage capacities grow and computers and sensors shrink, some researchers foresee the emergence of computing ecosystems that can automatically capture and store “digital memories” of everything that happens in a person’s daily life. Such a gigantic store of accumulated data would require an AI competent at organizing information. Positive feedback might occur: the better digital intermediaries get at finding meaningful patterns in data, the more they know about the user. The more they know about the user, the better they get at finding meaningful patterns.

Digital intermediaries might develop into what Ben Goertzel has called “digital twins”: “An AI-powered avatar…embodying one’s ideas and preferences and [making] a reasonable emulation of the decisions one would make.” Some have argued that this approach is unlikely to capture enough information about a person to equal a mind upload. I agree. I think “digital twins” are unlikely to convince people that they are the person they claim to be, if subjected to lengthy interrogation by close family and friends. But they are more likely to be developed before “mind children”, as will software designed around partial understandings of the structure and functions of the brain. How will regular interactions with digital intermediaries, digital twins, and a clearer understanding of how the mind works affect concepts of “self”?

NO FIXED ESSENCE OF IDENTITY

Traditionally (in the West at least), the self has been attributed to an incorporeal soul, making “I” a fixed essence of identity. But neuroscience is revealing the self as an interplay of cells and chemical processes occurring in the brain — in other words, a transitory dynamic phenomena arising from certain physical processes. German philosopher Thomas Mezinger’s “Phenomenal Self Model” moves away from a notion of “I” as a substance (incorporeal though it may be) and replaces it with representations of the information that is processed in the brain. The phenomenal self model challenges the “fixed essence of identity” that underlies expressions such as “she is no longer herself.” There isn’t any self in that sense; rather (in Lone Frank’s words) “life is not so much about finding yourself but choosing yourself or molding yourself into the shape you want to be…. The neurotechnology of the future will likewise produce the means for transforming the physical self — be it through various cognitive techniques, targeted drugs, or electronic implants…our individual self will simply be a broad range of possible selves.”

By the time mind uploading is generally available, perhaps people will have forgotten a time when a singular self was “normal.” They will be used to multiple viewpoints, their brains processing information coming not only from their local surroundings, but also from the remote sensors and cyberspaces they are simultaneously linked to. They will have already become familiar with mental concepts migrating from the brain to spawn digital intermediaries within the clouds of smart dust that surround them. Every idea, each inspiration, would give birth to software lifeforms introspecting from many different perspectives before integrating the results of their considerations with the primary consciousness that spawned them. Each and every brain (whether robot, human, or a hybrid) will continually send and receive perceptions etc. to and from their personal exocortex, operating within the Dust. Just as computers can already cluster together to create temporary supercomputing platforms, perhaps many exocortices will cluster together to form metacortices within…what?

Well, that’s another question. I will not attempt to answer it, but return instead to the question: “who would want mind uploading?” Perhaps Greg Egan is right, and only the terminally ill who have exhausted all other possibilities for life extension would be prepared to undergo the procedure. Maybe it would appeal only to those who have created and developed “digital people” and who seek to give their “offspring” autonomy by arranging to create a duplicate of their mind, installed in hardware that will enable the digital person to grow in ways its “parent” could scarcely imagine. Or, just maybe, enabling technologies and knowledge gained during the reverse-engineering of living brains will turn current conceptions about “self” upside down. Maybe debates over whether or not “the copy is you” will turn out to have been precisely the wrong kinds of questions to ask.

The right questions can only be known to the future society that must co-exist with practical mind uploading technologies.

See Also
h+ Magazine Current Issue
Blue Brain in a Virtual Body
The Reluctant Transhumanst: Charlie Stross

Recent Article
On the Importance of Being a Cyborg Feminist

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Powerful Ideas: Military Develops 'Cybug' Spies
Charles Q. Choi
Special to LiveScience
livescience.com – Tue Jul 14, 9:26 am ET

Miniature robots could be good spies, but researchers now are experimenting with insect cyborgs or "cybugs" that could work even better.

Scientists can already control the flight of real moths using implanted devices.

The military and spy world no doubt would love tiny, live camera-wielding versions of Predator drones that could fly undetected into places where no human could ever go to snoop on the enemy. Developing such robots has proven a challenge so far, with one major hurdle being inventing an energy source for the droids that is both low weight and high power. Still, evidence that such machines are possible is ample in nature in the form of insects, which convert biological energy into flight.

It makes sense to pattern robots after insects - after all, they must be doing something right, seeing as they are the most successful animals on the planet, comprising roughly 75 percent of all animal species known to humanity. Indeed, scientists have patterned robots after insects and other animals for decades - to mimic cockroach wall-crawling, for instance, or the grasshopper's leap.

Mechanical metamorphosis

Instead of attempting to create sophisticated robots that imitate the complexity in the insect form that required millions of years of evolution to achieve, scientists now essentially want to hijack bugs for use as robots.

Originally researchers sought to control insects by gluing machinery onto their backs, but such links were not always reliable. To overcome this hurdle, the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) program is sponsoring research into surgically implanting microchips straight into insects as they grow, intertwining their nerves and muscles with circuitry that can then steer the critters. As expensive as these devices might be to manufacture and embed in the bugs, they could still prove cheaper than building miniature robots from scratch.

As these cyborgs heal from their surgery while they naturally metamorphose from one developmental stage to the next - for instance, from caterpillar to butterfly - the result would yield a more reliable connection between the devices and the insects, the thinking goes. The fact that insects are immobile during some of these stages - for instance, when they are metamorphosing in cocoons - means they can be manipulated far more easily than if they were actively wriggling, meaning that devices could be implanted with assembly-line routine, significantly lowering costs.

The HI-MEMS program at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has to date invested $12 million into research since it began in 2006. It currently supports these cybug projects:

- Roaches at Texas A&M.
- Horned beetles at University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley.
- Moths at an MIT-led team, and another moth project at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research.

Success with moths

So far researchers have successfully embedded MEMS into developing insects, and living adult insects have emerged with the embedded systems intact, a DARPA spokesperson told LiveScience. Researchers have also demonstrated that such devices can indeed control the flight of moths, albeit when they are tethered.

To power the devices, instead of relying on batteries, the hope is to convert the heat and mechanical energy the insect generates as it moves into electricity. The insects themselves could be optimized to generate electricity.

When the researchers can properly control the insects using the embedded devices, the cybugs might then enter the field, equipped with cameras, microphones and other sensors to help them spy on targets or sniff out explosives. Although insects do not always live very long in the wild, the cyborgs' lives could be prolonged by attaching devices that feed them.

The scientists are now working toward controlled, untethered flight, with the final goal being delivering the insect within 15 feet (5 m) of a specific target located 300 feet (100 meters) away, using electronic remote control by radio or GPS or both, standing still on arrival.

Although flying insects such as moths and dragonflies are of great interest, hopping and swimming insects could also be useful, too, DARPA noted. It's conceivable that eventually a swarm of cybugs could converge on targets by land, sea and air.

Video: Human-Robot Mergers
Microbe and Machine Merged to Create First 'Cellborg'
10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life
Original Story: Powerful Ideas: Military Develops 'Cybug' Spies

Related Searches: hybrid insect micro-electro-mechanical systems, darpa, livescience

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Extracts From Mind Control Books by (the late) Jim Keith

Mind Control, World Control - Jim Keith (1997) - Word document
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ltnzyhnirhh

Mass Control - Engineering Human Consciousness - Jim Keith (1999) - Word document
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?10j2yw4tdkz

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Microchip Implants, Mind Control, and Cybernetics
by Rauni-Leena Luukanen-Kilde, MD Former Chief Medical Officer of Finland December 6, 2000

In 1948 Norbert Weiner published a book, Cybernetics, defined as a neurological communication and control theory already in use in small circles at that time. Yoneji Masuda, "Father of the Information Society," stated his concern in 1980 that our liberty is threatened Orwellian-style by cybernetic technology totally unknown to most people. This technology links the brains of people via implanted microchips to satellites controlled by ground-based supercomputers.

The first brain implants were surgically inserted in 1974 in the state of Ohio, USA and also in Stockholm, Sweden. Brain electrodes were inserted into the skulls of babies in 1946 without the knowledge of their parents. In the 1950s and 60s, electrical implants were inserted into the brains of animals and humans, especially in the U.S., during research into behavior modification, and brain and body functioning. Mind control (MC) methods were used in attempts to change human behavior and attitudes. Influencing brain functions became an important goal of military and intelligence services.

Thirty years ago brain implants showed up in X-rays the size of one centimeter. Subsequent implants shrunk to the size of a grain of rice. They were made of silicon, later still of gallium arsenide. Today they are small enough to be inserted into the neck or back, and also intravenously in different parts of the body during surgical operations, with or without the consent of the subject. It is now almost impossible to detect or remove them.

It is technically possible for every newborn to be injected with a microchip, which could then function to identify the person for the rest of his or her life. Such plans are secretly being discussed in the U.S. without any public airing of the privacy issues involved. In Sweden, Prime Minister Olof Palme gave permission in 1973 to implant prisoners, and Data Inspection's ex-Director General Jan Freese revealed that nursing-home patients were implanted in the mid-1980s. The technology is revealed in the 1972:47 Swedish state report, Statens Officiella Utradninger (SOU).

Implanted human beings can be followed anywhere. Their brain functions can be remotely monitored by supercomputers and even altered through the changing of frequencies. Guinea pigs in secret experiments have included prisoners, soldiers, mental patients, handicapped children, deaf and blind people, homosexuals, single women, the elderly, school children, and any group of people considered "marginal" by the elite experimenters. The published experiences of prisoners in Utah State Prison, for example, are shocking to the conscience.

Today's microchips operate by means of low-frequency radio waves that target them. With the help of satellites, the implanted person can be tracked anywhere on the globe. Such a technique was among a number tested in the Iraq war, according to Dr. Carl Sanders, who invented the intelligence-manned interface (IMI) biotic, which is injected into people. (Earlier during the Vietnam War, soldiers were injected with the Rambo chip, designed to increase adrenaline flow into the bloodstream.) The 20-billion-bit/second supercomputers at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) could now "see and hear" what soldiers experience in the battlefield with a remote monitoring system (RMS).

When a 5-micromillimeter microchip (the diameter of a strand of hair is 50 micromillimeters) is placed into optical nerve of the eye, it draws neuroimpulses from the brain that embody the experiences, smells, sights, and voice of the implanted person. Once transferred and stored in a computer, these neuroimpulses can be projected back to the person’s brain via the microchip to be reexperienced. Using a RMS, a land-based computer operator can send electromagnetic messages (encoded as signals) to the nervous system, affecting the target's performance. With RMS, healthy persons can be induced to see hallucinations and to hear voices in their heads.

Every thought, reaction, hearing, and visual observation causes a certain neurological potential, spikes, and patterns in the brain and its electromagnetic fields, which can now be decoded into thoughts, pictures, and voices. Electromagnetic stimulation can therefore change a person's brainwaves and affect muscular activity, causing painful muscular cramps experienced as torture.

The NSA's electronic surveillance system can simultaneously follow and handle millions of people. Each of us has a unique bioelectrical resonance frequency in the brain, just as we have unique fingerprints. With electromagnetic frequency (EMF) brain stimulation fully coded, pulsating electromagnetic signals can be sent to the brain, causing the desired voice and visual effects to be experienced by the target. This is a form of electronic warfare. U.S. astronauts were implanted before they were sent into space so their thoughts could be followed and all their emotions could be registered 24 hours a day.

The Washington Post reported in May 1995 that Prince William of Great Britain was implanted at the age of 12. Thus, if he were ever kidnapped, a radio wave with a specific frequency could be targeted to his microchip. The chip’s signal would be routed through a satellite to the computer screen of police headquarters, where the Prince’s movements could be followed. He could actually be located anywhere on the globe.

The mass media has not reported that an implanted person's privacy vanishes for the rest of his or her life. She can be manipulated in many ways. Using different frequencies, the secret controller of this equipment can even change a person's emotional life. She can be made aggressive or lethargic. Sexuality can be artificially influenced. Thought signals and subconscious thinking can be read, dreams affected and even induced, all without the knowledge or consent of the implanted person.

A perfect cyber-soldier can thus be created. This secret technology has been used by military forces in certain NATO countries since the 1980s without civilian and academic populations having heard anything about it. Thus, little information about such invasive mind-control systems is available in professional and academic journals.

The NSA's Signals Intelligence group can remotely monitor information from human brains by decoding the evoked potentials (3.50 HZ, 5 milliwatt) emitted by the brain. Prisoner experimentees in both Gothenburg, Sweden and Vienna, Austria have been found to have evident brain lesions. Diminished blood circulation and lack of oxygen in the right temporal frontal lobes result where brain implants are usually operative. A Finnish experimentee experienced brain atrophy and intermittent attacks of unconsciousness due to lack of oxygen.

Mind control techniques can be used for political purposes. The goal of mind controllers today is to induce the targeted persons or groups to act against his or her own convictions and best interests. Zombified individuals can even be programmed to murder and remember nothing of their crime afterward. Alarming examples of this phenomenon can be found in the U.S.

This “silent war” is being conducted against unknowing civilians and soldiers by military and intelligence agencies. Since 1980, electronic stimulation of the brain (ESB) has been secretly used to control people targeted without their knowledge or consent. All international human rights agreements forbid non consensual manipulation of human beings — even in prisons, not to speak of civilian populations.

Under an initiative of U.S. Senator John Glenn, discussions commenced in January 1997 about the dangers of radiating civilian populations. Targeting people’s brain functions with electromagnetic fields and beams (from helicopters and airplanes, satellites, from parked vans, neighboring houses, telephone poles, electrical appliances, mobile phones, TV, radio, etc.) is part of the radiation problem that should be addressed in democratically elected government bodies.

In addition to electronic MC, chemical methods have also been developed. Mind-altering drugs and different smelling gasses affecting brain function negatively can be injected into air ducts or water pipes. Bacteria and viruses have also been tested this way in several countries.

Today's super technology, connecting our brain functions via microchips (or even without them, according to the latest technology) to computers via satellites in the U.S. or Israel, poses the gravest threat to humanity. The latest supercomputers are powerful enough to monitor the whole world’s population. What will happen when people are tempted by false premises to allow microchips into their bodies? One lure will be a microchip identity card. Compulsory legislation has even been secretly proposed in the U.S. to criminalize removal of an ID implant.

Are we ready for the robotization of mankind and the total elimination of privacy, including freedom of thought? How many of us would want to cede our entire life, including our most secret thoughts, to Big Brother? Yet the technology exists to create a totalitarian New World Order. Covert neurological communication systems are in place to counteract independent thinking and to control social and political activity on behalf of self-serving private and military interests.

When our brain functions are already connected to supercomputers by means of radio implants and microchips, it will be too late for protest. This threat can be defeated only by educating the public, using available literature on biotelemetry and information exchanged at international congresses.

One reason this technology has remained a state secret is the widespread prestige of the psychiatric Diagnostic Statistical Manual IV produced by the U.S. American Psychiatric Association (APA) and printed in 18 languages. Psychiatrists working for U.S. intelligence agencies no doubt participated in writing and revising this manual. This psychiatric "bible" covers up the secret development of MC technologies by labeling some of their effects as symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

Victims of mind control experimentation are thus routinely diagnosed, knee-jerk fashion, as mentally ill by doctors who learned the DSM “symptom” list in medical school. Physicians have not been schooled that patients may be telling the truth when they report being targeted against their will or being used as guinea pigs for electronic, chemical and bacteriological forms of psychological warfare.

Time is running out for changing the direction of military medicine, and ensuring the future of human freedom.

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This article was originally published in the 36th-year edition of the Finnish-language journal SPEKULA (3rd Quarter, 1999). SPEKULA (circulation 6500) is a publication of Northern Finland medical students and doctors of Oulu University OLK (Oulun Laaketieteellinen Kilta). It is mailed to all medical students of Finland and all Northern Finland medical doctors.